If You Are to Return, Let It Be Good
by LostCompass
Summary: Before Max and Chloe reunited, before the storm, there was you. The god of time. You keep a good hold of your mind, now. It's an easy thing to lose.
1. If

You lean on the shovel, pulling in ragged breaths through your nose. Your legs shake. The splinters in your fingers hum along to your heartbeat.

The hole in front of you is three feet deep. That hole, and the countless others dotting the field, some right against the line of trees.

The sun dips below the horizon, and darkness settles onto the—

You close your eyes, grit your teeth, and REGRESS.

You open your eyes, and the sun is high in the sky.

Five hours before. The field, unbroken. The strength back in your muscles.

You walk to a new patch of ground, and begin to dig.

You've REGRESSED four times. Five hours, four times—twenty hours, just about. Not the worst you've ever done.

But as you dig, you blink, look up, and see the holes again—too many, hundreds, like the cratered surface of a green moon. And just as soon as they appear, they vanish.

You shake your head. Focus.

Two REGRESSIONS ago, you considered ditching the shovel and getting a metal detector. But that's just wishful thinking. They would have thought of that.

Stop thinking. Dig.

You take a piss on a nearby tree, like you have every time.

Stop thinking. Dig.

You should have eaten something beforehand. You were in too much of a hurry. Now sweat is stinging your eyes and your stomach is full only of dread.

Stop thinking. Dig.

You slam your boot against the footrest of the shovel, but instead of burrowing into the soil, it collides with something hard.

Three REGRESSSIONS ago, that would have excited you. Made your heart rate tick up. But now you know it's likely just a long-dead root, or a rock.

Yeah, just a root. Fuck. Keep digging.

The sun dips below the horizon, and darkness settles onto the—

You draw in breath—through your mouth and nose, draw it in hard like a snarl in reverse.

You don't close your eyes, this time. You keep them open, and _REGRESS_.

You watch the world shudder, twist, fold upon itself. Watch it seize up, halt, crush itself with its own momentum.

And then... gradually at first...

It turns.

Turns backward.

The sun rises, agonizingly, from the red edge of the western horizon. The shadows grow shorter and shorter, pulling close, as if afraid. The sky mottles from dark blue-purple to red to blue, all too quickly, like a bruise coming undone. The trees sway wrongly to a backwards wind.

And you see yourself, digging in reverse. Burying. Your own motions going from tired and labored back to energetic and driven.

And then...

It stops, and you're back.

You heft up the shovel—

And feel something warm on your face.

Another nosebleed, probably. Not a big deal, since—

You touch your nose, your lip, but find them dry. Your cheeks are wet.

Your hand traces upwards, to your eyes.

You pull your fingers away, stare at the redness between them. Taste it, out of habit. Bitter.

... Your eyes, this time. You're bleeding from your eyes.

Somewhere, deep inside you, something roils and growls—and it forces itself from your stomach into your chest and climbs up your throat.

A chuckle.

You've bled from your nose, your gums, your ears, your _fingernails_... but never your eyes. This is new.

You wipe your red tears on the back of your sleeve. So be it. If you die out here of blood loss, at least you'll have a grave to fall into.

You keep digging.

The sun hangs low in the sky, making you squint. And again, you are surrounded by holes, empty holes, looking up at you expectantly.

One more.

You've said that hundreds of times today—the many todays of today—and like all of those times before, you mean it.

One more.

The muscles of your back strain, your neck aches, your arms are aflame, your joints creak, but you furrow your brow and heave the soil away—

And three feet down, you stop.

Your shovel hits something soft.

Twenty five hours of anxiety reawakens in you, surges for release but finds none. You just stand there, clinging to your shovel like an anchor.

You reach down, on your knees and carefully, gently, begins pulls away handfuls of soil.

You see the back of a head.

There is no feeling in your fingers. You pull away more soil.

The back of a neck.

You touch it.

You jerk back, frozen, struggle to level your breathing.

Buried face down.

You slowly begin to rock back and forth. Your knees groan beneath you.

You were ready for this. You had gone over it in your head so many times. You would stand up, tall, straight, strong, and roar your wrath to the heavens. You would scatter the clouds. You would shake the sky itself. Your rage would be felt in rainfall and drought across the world. Your hate would illuminate the night, and no one would sleep. All would feel your hate. All would know.

... But none of that comes.

Instead, you simply sit on your heels, head down, blinking as something warm runs down your face.

The sun dips below the horizon, and darkness settles onto the field.


	2. You

Hate, you learn, does not make good company.

You stalk the streets without purpose. Like rolling grey waves, the sidewalk rises to meet your boots. You walk to one end of the city, stop, stare into nothing, then turn on your heel and walk to the other side.

You REGRESS—just barely. A second. Half a second. Here and there. Between steps. Between breaths. Between blinks. You bite down on your tongue, keep your eyes wide open. Force yourself back into a reality you detest.

Human bodies flow past you like grains of sand in an hourglass. You brush shoulders, knock elbows, but don't look back. Noise is but a dim vibration, lost somewhere in your inner ear.

You stop—why did you stop?— in the middle of a crosswalk, letting people stream past you. Then you're the last one in the street, horns honking, people shouting and cursing.

You turn, look through the windshields, look blankly at the angry faces.

You focus on one—a young man in a hatchback—and begin walking towards his car, jaw set.

His anger melts into consternation as you approach his door and rap your knuckles on the window.

He stares straight ahead, mouth a thin line, face schooled into neutrality.

You frown. The cars pass.

These people don't know anger. Not yet.

You grit your teeth, and REGRESS.

0-0-0-0-0-0-0

A couple passes you on the sidewalk. You bump into the woman.

"Watch it," the man snaps, his masculinity at stake.

You can only beat his head three times against the concrete before rough hands pull you away.

You grit your teeth, and REGRESS.

0-0-0-0-0-0-0

You go home. It is a mistake.

You sit in your shower, letting hot water run down your back. Close to scalding. How you always like it.

You stare at the space between your knees, at the white tiles of the shower.

The new calluses on your hands ache from the heat. You flex your fingers tentatively, feeling out the soreness.

Except you don't have any new calluses. When you found—

You take a shuddering breath. Some water gets in your mouth.

When you found _him_ , you REGRESSED—you REGRESSED so fucking hard it was the previous morning and you were sitting in your car. You didn't need to find the place, not again; the exact location was burnt into the inner walls of your skull. You couldn't forget if you wanted to.

You look at your palm, finding it pristine, albeit wrinkled and apelike from the hot water. But... the pain is there, somewhere. In there.

Like phantom pain, he had said.

But you can't have phantom pain for something you never had.

You get out of the shower. The cold air makes your skin feel raw.

You look at the clock and realize you were sitting in the shower for a damn hour.

Water bills. You grit your teeth.

You REGRESS.

0-0-0-0-0-0-0

At first you avoided people, because you thought you wanted to be alone.

Turns out being alone with your thoughts is the worst place to be right now.

You go to the café. You know, _that_ café. Independent establishment, 'chic' and 'cool,' a little too Bohemian for your tastes, but right now you can't taste a damn thing anyway. You walk—you don't trust yourself in a car right now. It's late morning, and as such those with real jobs have left and only students or whoever else remains.

You move through the array of tables, past the pieces of questionable art hung next to posters declaring local events. You sit in a booth in the corner, as you've always preferred. You like having your back to a wall.

A waitress sashays up, slides you a menu, asks if you want anything to start with. You shake your head, and remembering that normal people usually speak to each other, you force out a strained "Not yet." Your eyes widen slightly—was that the right thing to say? Should you REGRESS? Should—

She gives you a bright "alright, ready when you are" and is already off tending to another table.

... Okay, then. So you sit and listen to the conversations. Listen to normal people talk. Listen to normalcy. You lower your head, open your ears, quiet your rampaging thoughts.

A term paper on something obscure.

The local sports team.

Two lovers speaking sweet nonsense.

Car is in the shop.

Coffee's pretty good, but there's this other place—

"Have you decided yet?"

You lift your head, blinking. The waitress is back, looking down at you with... apprehension? Concern? Her septum piercing makes it hard to tell. Throws off the facial read.

You swallow. Your throat is dry. "Not yet," you say again, just above a whisper.

She smiles, but it's strained. "You've been here for forty-five minutes," she says as politely as possible.

Your look of surprise must be obvious. "Are you okay?" she asks, concern eclipsing the apprehension.

"I will be," you utter, and REGRESS.

You lay your palms on the table. The wood is cool. The grain pleasant to the touch.

You take a deep breath.

"Can I get you anyth—"

 _"NOT YET!"_ you snarl, starting out of your seat. The waitress recoils, fists up; heads turn. Silence.

You look down. You've dragged your nails across the table, leaving long gouges; the splinters gathering blood.

You look at her apologetically, and REGRESS.

"Can I get you anything?"

"Just a coffee. Black."

She brings it. You hold it in your hands, unsure of what to do with it. Then you remember.

"You look pretty blue."

"A friend of mine died."

Sympathy. "Oh, I'm so sorry."

You drink. Bitter. You burn your tongue. "Don't be."

0-0-0-0-0-0-0

You walk in.

"We close in an hour," the bartender says.

"I know."

"You want anything?"

You eye the bottles lining the back of the bar. "Whiskey."

He pours. You drink. You frown.

You smash the glass on the counter.

You REGRESS.

"You want anything?"

You look a little more carefully, this time. "That bourbon. That one."

He pours. You drink. You frown.

You smash the glass on the counter.

You REGRESS.

"You want anything?"

You shake your head, lick your lips. "You know... just a water, for now."

The bartender nods, unimpressed.

0-0-0-0-0-0-0

Bars are closing.

You stand there, hands in pockets, humming tunelessly to the buzz of the streetlights.

A drunk man wanders over to you, and begins humming too.

You hum together for a little bit.

He fishes through his pockets. "Got a light?"

"No, sorry," you say.

"Then fuck you."

Your folding knife is out and you've stabbed him twice in the back. He stumbles and crumples to the sidewalk, too stunned to scream. You look down at him for a moment, then to your blood-speckled jeans, and to your red hands.

Then you REGRESS.

0-0-0-0-0-0-0

You carry that hate, hot and sultry in your chest. But it's too much.

It was invigorating, at first. Your blood ran warmer, everything sharper in contrast.

As you cut through a park on the way home, you... deflate.

You stop, bracing yourself upon a nearby bench, breathing hard.

Cold.

You think back to the field. The holes. The unmarked grave. The face-down—

The flame catches. You narrow your eyes, look about you quickly, and continue on your way.


	3. Are

You look at the stack of books.

Coping with trauma. Living with PTSD. Readjustment. All that kind of shit. But you knew this would happen. You knew you would need these eventually.

You could have ordered this off the Internet, express, and waited. But waiting seemed redundant, with so much time.

You must've looked like hell at the bookstore, back when this all began. Disheveled, dark circles under the eyes, buying a stack of self-help autopsychology bullshit. But you didn't really care. When the cashier stammered out the price, you threw him a double-handful of twenties and left. Keep the change.

So here you are, sitting on your bed, running your eyes up and down a tower of printed paper. You could've looked up all of this online, of course, but you needed something solid. Something real to hold and touch. Something to ground you to right-here-right-now.

You pick one up, smooth out the dustcover. You can't believe you're doing this. You don't look at the cover—you just turn to a random page, start reading.

Your brow furrows. Did you... get the wrong book? This isn't even English. You don't recognize—

The words swarm and sway like insects in front of your eyes, rearranging. You see the word 'memory' and drop the book. It jackknifes on the carpet.

You grip your skull in your hands, massaging your temples. You sniff, feel a nosebleed coming on. You grit your—

No. Stay here. Stay.

You slowly unclench your jaw.

There you go.

Count to three. Inhale. Count to three. Exhale.

You won't be avenging anyone if you can't fucking read.

0-0-0-0-0-0

When you were younger, you were always baffled when your teachers talked about the 'discovery' of fire.

Like something so natural is something to be discovered.

But you wondered, then, what it would be like—to stumble across that bright light and intense heat, and to have never seen it before.

To see fire for the first time. To see it for what it was. Not study or research or understand it, but _see_ it.

You'd never understand, your young self resignedly decided.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You look down.

It's all burning.

The city is in flames. As far as you can see, the world burns. The sky is black with smoke, embers falling like rain. Your eyes sting, your lungs seize—but you can't help but look.

A dog, its fur scorched to nothingness, its skin blackened, trots up to you on spindly limbs. It looks up, its red eyes shining like a dying sun.

 **"COME AND SEE,"** it whispers.

You do.

You descend into the city. All is burning, all is aflame, all is bright. Color is unknown; there is only the black of char and grey of ash and the red of fire. No orange or yellow; only an intense, excruciating red, a red that turns blood away from the canvas.

The buildings collapse, one after the other. When one building falls, a great billowing pillar of smoke and swirling fire rises in its stead. The streets crack apart underneath your feet, rising and falling unevenly.

People—no, what _once_ were people—reach out to you, weeping, screaming, cursing, begging. They reach their hands out.

You reach back.

When you touch them, they crumble to cinders and scatter into the searing wind. Their shadows are blasted into the ground.

The dog, its black skin taut over sharp bones, turns its sleek glassy head to look at you. Its white teeth shine like distant stars.

 **"COME AND SEE,"** it whispers, and walks into the flames.

But the flames are too hot. You stand, alone.

Always alone.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You open your eyes.

You don't get up. You lay there, staring at the wall.

The first time you sleep in two normal days, and the dream comes back to you. Of course.

You sit up on your bed, letting the covers pool in your lap. You squint at the clock. Fuzzy blue glow becomes four AM.

That dream has followed you ever since you learned you could... well, REGRESS. At first it scared you. Then it made you wary of dogs. But now, it evokes curiosity and deep dread in equal parts.

It can't be a premonition. That's absurd. Entire cities don't go up in flames, and people don't just disintegrate, and dogs don't fucking talk.

You run a hand over your eyes, picking at the dark red crust clinging to your lashes.

Then again, you have reason to be much less of a skeptic as of late.


	4. to

A moment of weakness.

You aren't ashamed. Everyone is weak, sometimes. And different as you are, you still fall under the categorization of 'everyone.'

"So..." Sarah wraps her hands around her cup of tea. "What did you want to tell me about?"

You stop pacing, look over at her.

You needed time, of all things. Your mind was a furnace. If you acted now, you'd burn away. You couldn't REGRESS far back enough—back before he died, anyway, so what was the point? So you waited—how you hated it—waited three weeks. Tried to be normal again. Carefully read the books. Went to the café every day or so. Spoke with that same waitress. Asked her how she was, about her day. Gradually learned her hours.

Her name is Sarah.

When you said the wrong thing—and you often did, as the embers of rage still flickered in you and your patience was a short wick— you would REGRESS, of course. But you can forgive that. You're not yourself right now. If you weren't in such dire straits, you wouldn't do something like that. Not to someone like her.

So you tell yourself. You tell yourself that with every text and phone call and joke and smile and shit-eating-grin argument over some meaningless thing.

"Well... you're not going to believe me when I say this," you begin. You've rehearsed this fuck knows how many times, even though you could just REGRESS as usual. But you rehearsed anyway.

Sarah raises a pierced eyebrow. "You might be surprised. Go on."

"It's going to sound weird."

"You're weird. We talk about weird things all the time," she points out.

"Point taken. So I'm just going to go ahead and say it, okay?" You grip the back of the chair across the table from her.

She nods.

You take a breath. "Okay. So... I can... I can kind of rewind time."

Congratulations. Your rehearsing didn't pay off for shit.

Sarah is silent, appraising you. Her eyebrows raise, at first. Then the corners of her mouth twitch up... then back down into a pursed line. She leans back in her chair, looking at the ceiling.

"Wow. You're serious."

"You believe me?" Shit. Even _you_ sound incredulous.

"I didn't say that." She taps her nails against the ceramic cup. "I gotta say, I expected something more... hm, plausible."

You clamp your mouth shut, feeling idiotic. And then: "Look, I don't blame you. I wouldn't believe me either. I mean, that's—that's insane. Goes against everything."

She leans her elbows on the table. "It sure does. So this, I presume, is the part where you show me some proof."

Got to hand it to her, she knows her conventions of the genre.

"Yeah." You look around her apartment, grab a pad of sticky notes off the counter—hopefully not her roommate's—and slide it over to her. "Okay, just... just, something—write something."

"Anything?"

"Sure, anything. Legibly, Miss Cursive," you add, and she snorts. You turn around. "My eyes are closed, too."

"Alright, alright."

You hear the scratching of a pen. A few letters, at most.

"Schadenfreude."

The scratching stops.

"... Nice trick," Sarah says, peeling to a new sticky note. The scratch of pen, and—

"Raison d'être."

The scratching stops. Before she can start again—

"Anti—antidisest—fuck—antidisestablishmentarian...ism." You peer at her over your shoulder. "Seriously?"

Sarah puts the pen down, scrutinizing you intently. You shift under her gaze. "Might I ask why you put cameras in my apartment?"

You shake your head. "You'll get a text from Cassie in about ten—er, eight seconds. She'll ask if you want anything from the store."

Sarah glances at her phone, then back to you. And, of course...

It vibrates. She looks at it. She puts it down. "So you and Cassie are in on it together," she says with a shrug.

You don't want to do this. "This part is going to be a little weirder."

She cocks her head slightly. "Weirder, how?"

You breath in, and: "You were born in Wichita, I knew that already, but you don't like telling anyone, ever since someone gave you the nickname 'farmgirl.' Your parents got a divorce when you were seventeen, but it was for the best. You say your middle name is Alexandra, but you don't actually have one. You have a sister and a half-brother, but you always felt closer to your brother for some reason. You got all of your tattoos on Sundays, all on your back. Kids made fun of you in high school until you broke some girl's nose at the flag pole. You used to bite your nails. You like watching reruns of the Brady Bunch for some god-forsaken reason. You got the scar on your elbow from falling out of a tree. You love dogs but you're allergic to them. Your dog's name was Caleb, growing up. Golden retriever. You, uh, have a belly-button piercing."

She just stares.

You spread your hands lamely.

"Tonight, we were going to drink and watch movies, right? Dawn of the Dead and Predator and The Thing—you know, you said it'd be a surprise, and that's what they were. Sorry. Ruined the surprise." You clear your throat. "We did watch them, though. I mean... we will, in the future. And we talked. Will talk. A lot. About—about a lot of different things. You told me that—all of that." Your throat is dry. "But tonight, I thought, you're the one I can tell all this to. So I... I just REGRESSED—"

"What?"

"I turned back time," you say thickly, "about six or seven hours. To tell you this. I couldn't think of a better..." You wave a hand, gesturing uselessly. "Time."

She is silent.

"... We start with vodka," you say quietly, jerking your head toward the kitchen. "You tell me you hate vodka, but Cassie loves it. I suggest getting something better, but you say terrible drinks—"

"... Go with great movies," she finishes.

"Yeah." You actually don't get that logic at all.

The silence grows and presses against the walls and windows. You can feel it pushing you towards the door.

"I'll go," you say softly, avoiding her eyes. "I'll keep this from happening. I can go back—"

"No."

You look up.

"Keep it this way."

You don't want to. It was your first run. You're already thinking of how this could've gone better.

"But one thing."

"Yeah?"

She's pulling the vodka out of the cabinets, giving you a very serious look. "When we watch movies tonight—" She pauses, finding the right words— "Do you tell me about your friend?"

You come close. So close to clenching your teeth and going back, going back and saying, no, sorry, I can't make it tonight.

"Yes."

She nods. "Then let's drink, chronographer."

0-0-0-0-0-0

Weakness.

A moment of weakness.

She's asleep on the couch. You're sitting on the floor, staring at the muted TV, swirling an inch of terrible vodka in a sweating glass.

You weren't ashamed. But you are now.


	5. Return

You sit, running your fingers through the ash. Soft. Feathery. Only a little gritty.

The black dog sits in front of you.

"You keep telling me that," you muse. "Come and see. Come and see. Come and see what?"

The black dog simply appraises you.

You stare into those red eyes, blindingly bright, see yourself reflected, suspended upside-down. "Have I seen it? Have I seen... what you want me to see?"

The black dog lowers its beautiful head.

"... No? Then... then _what?_ What is it?"

The dog rises, turns, and walks away.

Back into the flames from whence it came.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You open your eyes.

You look down, confused at the white lines covering you. Then you realize that those lines are bars of light, cast from the venetian blinds on the window.

You rise up, stiff from sleeping in a sitting position. Rubbing your neck, you look down, see Sarah still snoring softly on the couch.

You smile. Just a little one. You reach down and tousle her hair gently. She rolls over.

Once you've closed her apartment door behind you and walk to your car, your smile fades.

You didn't tell her the truth about him.

She didn't need to know.

And if she somehow finds out, well—

You can always REGRESS, you think grimly, your ribs pulling close to hold you together.

0-0-0-0-0-0

A low, deep thrum.

You press your ear to the ground, and listen.

What is that?

0-0-0-0-0-0

"Wake up, Kyle."

He groans, his chin against his chest.

"Come on. You're fine. Wake up."

He groans again, but slowly, agonizingly, lifts his head. His eyes flutter, unfocused, before finally locking blearily on to you.

"Wha... what..."

"Good. You downed enough hydrocodone to kill a bear."

His eyes open wider, and he looks down. He immediately begins straining against his bonds, shaking the chair. "What... what the fuck. What the fuck! What is this?"

"A chair."

He looks up at you, blinking under the fluorescent lights, really seeing you for the first time. "You...?"

"Me."

"What is this? What are you _doing?_ "

"Nothing, yet." You glance over to the toolbox set next to you.

"What the fuck—"

"Let's go ahead and get started. Have you seen Damien?"

He stares at you, mouth working. "What? What does that have to do—"

"It has to do with everything right now." You put a reassuring hand on his knee. He tries to pull away, but has nowhere to go. "Come on, answers."

He slurs as he speaks. "He owes you money, right? Over the pills. That's it. I get it. Yeah. But that's not me, man. That has nothing to do—"

You squeeze his knee. "Just answer, Kyle."

He looks everywhere but you. "I don't know. Can you get me out of this?" He flexes against the bonds—electrical wire, mostly. A few power cords you cut up. "I'm not gonna do anything, man, we can just talk—"

"We did talk."

He stares again.

"We talked. Got drinks. Came back to your place. Drank more. Followed the doctor's orders. Talked more. You didn't tell me what I wanted." You gesture all around. "Now we're here. I'm trying a more hands-on approach."

"I don't know—"

"Yes, you do," you utter, drawing dark patience from an unknown well. You reach behind your chair and drop a plastic bag full of cellphones in his lap.

He looks stricken.

"See, I call Damien, and he doesn't answer. He moved a while back, you see. Up and left. That's not what friends do."

"I... I didn't—"

"But look at you, having entire conversations over text. Ah," you say, holding up a finger as he opens his mouth. "Pseudonyms. I know how Damien texts. He texts like he talks. It's a bad habit."

He turns his face away. He's looking at his own basement like it's a gulag.

"Let's look at this exchange... it's been going for what, month-and-a-half, two months? About the time he disappeared on me." You nod to yourself. "So, Kyle. You going to let two friends be reunited?"

"Fuck," he mutters to himself. "I don't—"

You sigh, lean over, and open the toolbox. Your fingers ghost over the pliers, wire cutters, screwdrivers, hammer—

"Hey wait no no no wait listen just listen—"

You pull out the hammer, and let it hover over his knee.

"Fuck just listen man FUCK—"

You bring it down.

The acoustics in here are good. His howls have just the right amount of reverb.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You move to his fingers, his nails. Then his toes— you were smart enough to remove his shoes before lashing him to the chair. You don't know anything about torture, really, but you read some stuff about 'enhanced interrogation techniques' on the Internet and winged it from there.

You could have gone with a car battery and jumper cables and saltwater, but... too excessive.

It's been only ten minutes, and he's sobbing, shaking his head back and forth, repeating "I don't know" like some kind of protective chant.

"You know, Kyle," you say mildly, rolling a screwdriver over your hand, "I don't think you're sober. That's why you're being difficult." You frown. "I'll give you some time."

You get up, walk over to the lightswitch by the stairs. "You want the lights on, or off?"

"Don't—"

You plunge the basement into darkness and walk up the stairs.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You look in Kyle's bathroom mirror. You're bit of a mess. But you brought a change of clothes, just in case, so it works out.

More waiting. What are you going to do for half an hour as that idiot comes to his senses?

You move through his house, hands in pockets, humming. You've already ransacked the place. No evidence, nothing to go on.

With a sigh, you sit down on his overpriced leather couch and pick up a PlayStation controller.

Generic Shooter 3000 will have to do.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You glance at the clock.

Two hours have passed. You're not so good at keeping track of time, anymore.

Shit. You could REGRESS, but... nah.

You descend back into the basement, flip on the lights. Kyle gives a start.

"See, look at you. You look better already."

His eyes are wide, afraid, but... there's a little defiance, in there. Interesting. "Why?"

" _Because_ is a good enough answer."

"You," he spits, "you're fucking crazy."

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves." You sit back down, crossing your legs. "Do you feel like being cooperative?"

He starts naming names. Name's you've never heard. You tell him to slow down as you jot it all down on a notepad. You'll cross-reference these through his phones later. "Uh huh… uh huh. Anything else?"

"I don't know where he is."

"You don't know where the guy you buy pills from is? Come the fuck on, Kyle. That's not good business partnership. And you and Damien are friends. Like how me and Damien are friends. How would you feel if someone wouldn't tell you where your friends were?"

"I haven't—"

You reach behind the chair and pull out the Smith and Wesson. A chromed, long-barreled piece for target shooting, mostly, but a suitable safe queen for empty-lifed yuppies like Kyle.

He gapes at it. "How—"

"You showed it to me. You wanted to play Russian roulette, but with six shots. You almost blew your brains out." Well, he did, one time.

You prod his crotch with the muzzle. He flinches, sputters.

"Some people are into that kind of thing," you say offhandedly.

His voice edges into a whine. "Come on, man—"

You level the barrel at his forehead. "No, _you_ come on. _You_ know. I know you know. You know. Tell me. Tell me."

"I don't—"

The crack of the gunshot is too loud. You clamp a hand to your ear. "Ow."

You look up, glance at the smoking gun. The back of Kyle's skull and some spare brain is slowly sliding down the wall. The shock of red is a nice departure from the dreary grey of the basement, you find yourself noticing.

Trigger was lighter than you thought. "My bad," you say. You REGRESS.

0-0-0-0-0-0

This is hell.

Kyle doesn't know shit.

The list of names—which you've memorized—is all he has to offer. But you'll take it.

You're not proud to admit it, but you let your anger get the better of you—bashing his head apart with the hammer, REGRESSING, stabbing him in the eyes and chest with a screwdriver, REGRESSING, shooting him in the gut and watching him writhe and spasm.

And then REGRESSING.

Immature. You're acting like a child, and you know it. Stop.

You taste something in your mouth. Slick and bitter.

Your gums are bleeding.

You sit down, exhausted. "You're a real piece of work, you know."

His eyes are closed. His chin rests against his chest. "Damien said... there was something wrong with you." His voice is odd, now, since you subtracted some teeth from him.

You pause. "There's nothing wrong with me."

"He said you lost it. You changed. You changed and now you do crazy shit you would never do."

"Nothing has changed."

You swallow the blood in your mouth, and REGRESS.


	6. Let

This is the second time you've stood at the door of the café today.

Last time, you saw Sarah through the window, she waved, and you REGRESSED all the way back to your room.

You slept too soundly last night. Even the dog didn't visit you. You prepared yourself—prepared yourself to freak out, to break down, to have a panic attack—anything that would happen to normal people after murdering someone.

But it never came.

Because Kyle never died, right? Sure, you remember, murdering him over and over and over again, grinding him into a fine nothingness, but in reality, right here, this reality, he's _alive._ So why be concerned? It's no different than someone fantasizing about brutally killing their boss or in-laws. Very human. Very normal.

You look at the list of names you scrawled on the back of an old envelope.

Leads or dead ends. You don't know. Should you bother? Stalk and abduct and tie up each and every one, stow them in the trunk of your car? Is that how you're going to be, from now on?

You had looked over the phones again. You felt your face grow hot as you looked over the conversations between Kyle and Damien, but then you realized something after some more scrolling.

Emojis.

Damien never used emojis. And there they were.

You threw the phone across the room, screamed, REGRESSED second by second in your fury.

Nothing. Kyle had nothing. Damien truly had disappeared, leaving nothing but your confusion in his wake.

You called his sister, asked her where Damien was. She said he hadn't called in a while—four weeks?— but didn't mention moving. She sounded a bit worried on the phone.

You REGRESSED out of that call.

You sit on your bed, staring at the wall.

0-0-0-0-0-0

He was begging you. He was gripping your arms, shaking you.

"Turn it back!" he pleaded. "Turn it!"

You looked through him. You were so tired. When you grit your teeth... you would flicker back, a second. Two seconds.

"I can't," you whispered. "Damien, I—"

"You have to!"

"I—I can't."

"I know you can! Try! You have to!"

0-0-0-0-0-0

The wall begins to waver.

It yawns wide before you, like a vast black mouth.

The dog emerges, trotting out.

It looks up at you.

You place a hand on its head.

You feel warm.

0-0-0-0-0-0

The coffee steams. Smells good, too.

Wait.

You blink.

You look around. You're in the café. It's late.

Sarah slides into the booth, sitting across from you.

You look down into the cup, see your reflection.

"You've been doing it, haven't you?" she asks quietly, intently. She drags her finger on the table in a swirling motion. Counter-clockwise.

You consider REGRESSING out of this conversation, but... right now, you don't know where you'll end up.

So you nod.

"It hurts you," she continues.

"Anything can hurt you."

Her eyes narrow. She leans forward, her earnestness radiating. "Just—listen, just _try._ For a week. Just a week, try not to roll back, okay? You look—"

"I look terrible."

"I was going to say anemic and sleep-deprived and slightly haunted."

You chuckle a bit at that. Do you? You look pretty ordinary, you think. Then again, you've been avoiding mirrors. Stare at the walls or ceiling whenever you're brushing your teeth.

Sarah reaches out, touching your face. You flinch back. She was always forthright about that kind of thing.

"You're warm," she says. "Do you have a cold?"

You shake your head. She bites her lip.

"Look... remember a few days ago, you texted me in the morning—about five thirty—and told me to get up, since I forgot to set my alarm?"

You remember. You had wandered into the café, and Sarah had been having an utterly shitty day. And it all started with her being late. So you—

"I appreciated it," she says, her tone wary, "but... please, not anymore. If this hurts you, then... don't waste it on me, for little things like that. I mean it."

You look out the window. It's raining. You watch the clear beads slide down the glass.

0-0-0-0-0-0

At home, you really do it. You look in the mirror.

... Fuck.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You walk. You walk until you find a park and walk until you find a tree.

You sit under it, in the rain, letting the water soak through your clothes.

But the warmth stays.

If anyone looked closely, you imagine, they would see steam rising from your skin.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You drop a sandwhich.

"Fuck," you mutter, and clench your teeth—

...And pry your jaw apart, force yourself to stop. No, no. Come on. Not over something like this.

The rest of the day, you feel like you're living a torn-out page of a manuscript.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Eat. Sleep. Get outside. Be normal.

Look in the mirror. Not so grey. Circles not so dark under those eyes.

Sarah and Cassie and her friends are going out for drinks— come with? You stare at the text.

... Shit, why not?

So you go. You and Sarah and Cassie and two guy friends you've never seen, but they're friends of Sarah so they're friends of you. The five of you go from bar to bar, drinking and laughing and joking.

Sometimes you say something lame or stupid, or misspeak, want to REGRESS, but... no. Let it be. Sometimes you want to tell the joke right the first time, want to REGRESS, but... no.

Let it be.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You switch on the lights.

"Sorry, it's bit of a mess."

But Sarah comes in and falls gracelessly across the couch, nuzzling into it. You roll your eyes. You go to the kitchen, fill three glasses of water, and place them in a line on the coffee table.

Sarah turns her head and looks at your accusingly. "I'm not that drunk," she contests.

"Sure."

She throws a pillow at you. It knocks one of the glasses to the carpet. You clench your teeth—

"Don't!" Sarah grabs at your jacket, and you jerk away.

You both stand there, staring at the growing waterstain in the carpet.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

0-0-0-0-0-0

You put on a movie. You don't know which one. Doesn't matter, if it's not good, you can just REGRESS out of it.

You sit on the couch, staring through the TV.

You and Sarah didn't have much to say to each other that night. So you both watched—or, at least one of you did, you think—and when she dozed off, you turned it off and sat in silence for a while.

You can think of every single time you were going to REGRESS today. And yesterday. And the day before. But you forced yourself through those moments.

But you can feel them.

Those moments.

They're still with you, part of you, in you. One REGRESS and they'd be set free like so many steel moths, scraping your insides raw and clean. Just one REGRESS—

Sarah murmurs in her sleep.

You lean over, kiss her forehead, and go to bed.

As you lay in darkness, you can see two red points of light, looking at you.

You look back.


	7. It

"Look, if I murdered someone—"

"Who?"

"Anyone. Doesn't matter. So I'd just get on a boat and go into international waters. Then I could say, fuck you, no laws out here."

"That's not how it works."

"Space, then. Catch a ride on the rocket, hide on the far side of the moon."

"Yeah, okay."

"Okay, fine, what's _your_ grand plan?"

"Go to a small town, become a pillar of the community, and when they find me decades later, everyone will say, 'But he's such a nice guy!'"

"Pfft, sure."

"Yeah, somewhere like—I dunno—Arcadia Bay. Be this real upstanding fisherman."

"Well, when shit goes south, row into the Pacific and find me, fishmonger."

0-0-0-0-0-0

You open your eyes.

No. No. That's absolutely fucking ridiculous. No.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You're walking to the cafe.

At least, you think you're walking to the cafe. And you think you're walking.

Arcadia Bay? That shanty town? It's been in the news, hasn't it? You haven't paid attention. Nothing beyond you seems real, right now.

Town got crushed by a tropic storm out of nowhere. Something like that. But more people care about a few beached whales than tens of dead. Typical. Save the whales, fuck the humans.

That's what made you remember. It was—shit, how many years ago? You and Damien and _he_ went there for a summer, not having enough money to go somewhere exciting. So you drank coffee and looked at art and wandered around the wilderness and sort-of-not-really camped.

Why would Damien—

A screech of tires. A sound of flesh hitting hood. Screams from the crowd.

You look up, notice the man in a bloody sprawl of limbs on the street, sigh, and REGRESS—

You surge forward, hooking your fingers into the man's collar and yanking him back onto the sidewalk. He stumbles, drops his phone mid-text, falls on his ass.

"Hey, what—"

You don't care. You're already shouldering people aside, marching to the cafe, hands in pockets, eyes ahead.

This may be the last time you see Sarah, after all.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You're a block away.

You can see it from here.

You turn around and walk back the way you came.

0-0-0-0-0-0

When this all started—when Damien disappeared on you—you went to his house.

You were so angry at first you just kicked the door in—but then twenty minutes later a patrol car pulled up. Shit. You REGRESSED.

The second time, you actually used the spare key, twisting it so hard you thought you'd break it off in the lock. You two were like that—the kind of friends that would have keys to the other's house.

But as soon as you walked in and shut the door behind you, hate ignited.

You tore the place apart.

Cabinets, cupboards, closets, drawers. You overturned the furniture, cut open the chairs and couches, cut open his mattress, looked for hidden compartments. Looked behind bookshelves, the refrigerator. Looked under the sinks, in the cistern of the toilet. You hunted for crawlspaces, false walls, anything.

You moved on to his computer. Password? Didn't matter. You hammered in word after word, REGRESSING after every lockout. The keyboard rattled under your fingers. Five REGRESSIONS later, you cut through.

'Halogen.' Only seven letters? Weak, Damien. Should've thrown some numbers or punctuation in there.

You dug through his files, death-grip on the mouse making its plastic creak. Nothing. Even in the depths of his hard drive the most suspicious thing you found was a 'New Folder' filled with alt-lesbian porn. Your eyes flitted over the files, glazed.

With a roar, you flipped the table, sending it to crashing to the floor. You kicked the monitor across the room.

Sitting there in a darkening house that looked like it was ransacked by a foreign army, you decided that three items were missing.

One, Damien.

Two, Damien's car.

And three, Damien's gun.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You sit on your bed. You slowly rock back and forth.

You know where he is.

Beyond questioning. Beyond doubt.

You stand up. You pace around, kick dirty clothes out of your way. It warm in here? Air feels... heavy. You open one window. Then all of them. You turn and look around, but still, it's like you're peering through heatwaves.

You run your hands over the walls. Your fingers snag a light switch, and you flip the lights on and off a few times. You go into the bathroom and run cold water over your hands. You press your hands against the mirror, feeling the coolness, watching the lines of water slowly streak down.

You need to do something. You go to the kitchen. You'll do dishes, get your mind off of this. But there are no dishes because you're barely eating. You keep forgetting when you've eaten and when you haven't.

You cling to the sink, swaying. Steadying.

You know where he is.

You know where the both of them are. One, face-down in the field. The other, face-up in Arcadia Bay.

You pace. You pace and pace. You stop and stare down at the waterstain next to the coffee table.

You have no way of knowing. No true way.

But you know. Because you know Damien.


	8. Be

You drive for hours.

No sleep.

Whenever you sideswipe a car or a railing or a cop tries to pull you over, you REGRESS. More difficult in a moving vehicle, but nothing you can't manage. You've REGRESSED in worse situations.

You blink. You rub at your eyes, and your fingers come back red.

Come on.

Keep it together.

It's dark, and you're on a winding road, one side lined with dense pine, the other descending into darkness. You need to find your way back to the highway.

You find yourself losing focus, your grip slackening on the wheel. You're tired. All this anger, this constant anger always flaring hotter and hotter—it's exhausting.

You close your eyes. Open them. Slowly. Close them. Open... them.

Something darts in front of your car, and you swerve across the road, nearly slashing open the siderail. You risk a glance back over your shoulder.

What the hell? Out here, what would that— a deer? It was a deer, right?

No. It was shorter, stouter, close to the ground.

You shake your head.

Blood pools in your mouth, beneath your tongue. You swallow, feel your empty stomach contract.

Your skin prickles. Your vision blurs. You hit your head against the steering wheel, jarring yourself awake.

Keep.

It.

Together.

0-0-0-0-0-0

It's morning.

People in the streets, moving rubble, digging through wreckage, moving sandbags. Construction equipment. The smell of burning diesel fuel. The constant beeping of oversized vehicles backing up.

You stand on the sidewalk, arms crossed, watching. A piece of paper blows across the street, catches onto your boot. You look down, and a face looks up. Missing person? You're not surprised, given recent events. You kick the paper away.

You go to the local school, see the ambulances parked outside in the lot. You stick your head in the auditorium. Your eyes run over the cots, but... no, he's not here.

You wander the town for hours. You must look lost; a girl with blue hair who says most of the out-of-town volunteers are at the shore.

So you go.

You're at the waterfront, and the salt is thick in the air. Odd. There was a place here—the Whale Duo Diner, something like that— that you all ate at, once. Now, it's just splinters and broken glass.

You look to your left, and someone else is looking at the ruined diner.

You turn, your body facing him entirely. You turn, and the world turns with you. Day becomes night becomes day.

He glances aside, sees you.

You stand only ten feet apart.

How you had planned for this. You had it all ready, wound up and coiled oh so tightly. The exacting, cutting insults, the rising monologue that would reduce him to anguish, stormswept people would gather with hands covering their mouths in awe to hear you speak. A second storm, one from which Arcadia Bay would never recover. There would only be a smoldering crater, and you.

Nothing.

"Damien."

"You found me."

If you could kill with force of will, he would've been ash on the pavement.

You two stand there, staring at each other. Above you, the gulls wheel. And then...

"So, how are you?"

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

He rubs the back of his neck. He's gotten thin. Pale, too. "Yeah... okay, got me there. But we... you and I... we have a lot to talk about, don't we? So let's walk." He gestures to the beach.

You stand there, seething.

"Last words before you kill me," he says, and there's no humor.

You nod stiffly, and you walk, shoulder to shoulder, like old times.

0-0-0-0-0-0

It had been a strange storm.

Some buildings were flattened, others untouched— sometimes right next to each other. Pavement and piping had been ripped out of the ground in some places. Leaves and blades of grass were found embedded in cement and steel.

The wind and rain were there and gone in just a few hours.

"I was sure I was gonna die," Damien says, hands out in front of him, gesturing upon an invisible canvas. "It was just chaos. Absolute chaos. This massive pine tree almost ended me—" You kind of wish it did— "but then this girl comes outta nowhere, pulls me out of the way." He laughs, an empty and echoing sound. "She couldn't have been more than sixteen."

You say nothing. You've been walking for twenty minutes now, but you can't bring yourself to speak beyond a few words. You've said everything you've wanted to say to yourself, to your bathroom mirror, to your empty room. Repeating the words... is somehow false.

"I thought it was fate, in a way," he says wistfully. "Fate, destiny, a shitty call from the Oracle at Delphi. I run from you and dive headfirst into another storm."

Silence. You both stop and look at a beached whale, its carcass now a feasting ground for a seagull horde. The eco-activists probably found something else to wring their hands over. You watch as the birds bicker and shriek over shreds of blubber.

"Two months," you growl at last. "Two fucking months, Damien."

"I know. Long time for a vacation. And I didn't even write. Some friend I am, huh?" He tries to smile, only gets about halfway there. He scoops up a windblown seashell, turns it over in his hands idly. "People ask why I'm here. I say I'm a writer."

"Huh."

"Yeah. They ask what I'm writing, and I say—I say it's a book about a time traveler."

A glacier passes through you. "Funny."

He shrugs. "It was all that came to mind." He tosses the shell from hand to hand. "Couldn't think of a better reason to explain why I was living in a motel for a month, or why I ate every meal at a diner. You know—that one we used to go to. Place got wrecked."

You don't say anything.

"You know, the owner—I don't remember her name—she remembered me. Crazy, right? That was—what, five, six years ago? And after a fuckin' hurricane she remembers my face. Crazy."

You keep your hands in your pockets as you walk. You don't know what to do with them. One hand wants to strangle Damien. The other hand wants to beat him to death. They can't find a compromise.

"I, uh, helped with the cleanup. Moving broken stuff. Before that, I gave some kid CPR. Paramedics said he would've died otherwise."

You know he wants a response. You give him none.

"It didn't..." his face contorts into an alien expression. "It didn't feel good. They said I saved this kid's life, but it felt like... felt like I hadn't."

0-0-0-0-0-0

You keep walking. Damien keeps looking over at you. You don't look back. Why bother? You know what he looks like. You know what expression he'll be wearing. That combination of concern and expectation and that slight hint of challenge in his eyes.

Why say anything? You've both gone over this a hundred times in your respective heads, miles apart, him in a motel and you at home. Imagining how this would play out. And now here you are.

You walk.

It's just you and Damien and the lighthouse out here. Sounds of town are distant, people like specks of color on the far shore.

So you walk.

And walk.

And then:

"So... how's the daytrading going?"

"Shut the fuck up."

His mouth twists. "Not good, then."

That does it. You round on Damien, stopping him. You feel your eyes go wide, your entire self _open._ "I found him. I fucking found him. _I_ found him. You buried him like an _animal_. The—the—the field! _Our_ field! Where we—we—where we rode our bikes as kids! I dug and dug for hours—days!—and I found him. I found **Kurt.** "

Saying his name is like being born. You shudder, feel yourself compress against your own bones. There. You said it. Two months of silence, and you finally said his name. Kurt.

Kurt, Kurt, Kurt.

You waver, there; flicker in and out of frame. Are you falling? You feel like you're falling. Like you're looking up, and see yourself and Damien standing on a sandy street.

Damien steps back, lifting his open hands. "It was an accident—"

You take a step forward, teeth bared. "Like fuck it was!"

"It _was!_ But _you_ couldn't turn it back—"

"Fuck off! Fuck right off! Blaming me? Me? I didn't pull the trigger!"

Damien keeps looking around—for witnesses, maybe. Or for help. Keeps looking anywhere but you. "I couldn't—I—what would I say, then? To the police? 'My tripping-out best friend accidently got shot in the middle of the night over some pills, mistakes were made?' They'd keep investigating, and—"

"And what?"

"And find out about you!"

You shake your head. Slowly. "Don't. Don't pretend this is about me, you fucking murdering sack of shit."

"It _is_ about— look, Kurt was in a bad way, we both knew that, he knew that, we didn't mean for him to get shot—"

" _We?_ You can't even say _you_ shot him!"

"... But if an outsider looked into everything we'd been doing? The daytrading, the fantasy sports, the gambling— all that money? Who would call that coincidence? Who would find out? I didn't know what they'd do to you!"

"You don't know what I'm going to do to you," you grind out.

"... You think I left you for dead."

"Think? I _know!_ I would black out and wake up, no idea who I was or what _year_ it was— for days on end! I—"

"I know, okay? I _know._ I stayed with you for days. I didn't abandon you! I—every time, I'd tell you who you were, where you were, what happened. Sometimes it was like you had forgotten the day before. Sometimes the year before. You asked once if we were skipping class, like we were back in high school. Your brain would reset every—"

"Then why run? Why leave me?"

Damien looks sick. "You told me to run."

No. "What?"

"You came to, once, and looked at me. Your eyes were clear. Lucid. You said you turned it back—turned it back from a week later, and that you would kill me in a week if I didn't run. You told me to go. You _told_ me!" He's shaking. Then he laughs. It sounds like knives are caught in his throat. "I bury one friend, and the other tells me I'm a dead man walking. Of course I ran! Wouldn't you?"

"Bullshit," you utter.

"That's why I ditched my phone. So you couldn't track me. So by the time you found me, you'd be ready—"

"Ready? For _what?_ "

His old self-assurance, his old confidence; you see it slowly seep into his lines of his face. He stands a little straighter. Damien looks upon you like you're a demigod. "To turn it back. Turn it all back. Before Kurt got shot. Before—before all of this." He grabs you by the shoulders. "Get it now?"

You could vomit. But something keeps the blood down. "I can't go back. Not that far. Not—"

"That was then. You could go back thirty days at most, right? You must have gotten better since then. You kept on being able to keep going farther and farther back. So _now_ —"

You shake your head. "All of our back-and-forth those months ago burnt me out, Damien. I can't go back more than a day. Two, at most. A week would kill me. I... I'm all burnt out."

His mouth opens, closes. He lets go of you and you stumble back slightly, but his arms remain outstretched, petrified. They finally drop to his sides.

He turns and stares at the water.

You stare at the water too. The lighthouse looms over you both.

"Kurt," he whispers. He's shaking, now. Slowly pulling into himself.

"Why here?" you snap. You can barely stand this. You want to go. You never want to see this ocean again. You want to never see anything blue again. Let the sky be black, for all you care. "Why Arcadia Bay? Did it have to be a place I'd only figure out from a single, stupid fucking conversation?"

He's not listening. He just stares out into the waves.

"Did you... take his body...?"

"It's still in the field." It's just a body. An 'it.' Not what used to be one of your best friends. Keep telling yourself that.

He nods numbly. "Okay."

He turns, faces you. He looks at you a while, and you look back into his unfathomable eyes. He reaches behind his back and draws a pistol.

You immediately grab for it, wresting it out of his hands with a grunt. He stumbles away, holding his fingers.

"Not loaded," he mutters. You pull the slide, check the chamber, and he's right. Sig Sauers don't have safeties, after all. "I thought about it, you know. Killing myself. Bullet in the brain. Outrunning fate at the speed of sound. Then I thought about killing you—me, just sitting in that motel, waiting for you to kick down the door. Our old wargames made real. But—" He grins mirthlessly— "why bother? You can fuckin' rewind time. I can't kill you. No one can. I've probably already tried, haven't I?"

You don't give him the satisfaction of knowing.

Damien, with a long, suffering sigh, gets onto his knees.

You just look at him, there. Down there, kneeling.

You want to say he looks defeated. Vanquished. You want to say you stand over him like a conqueror. A vassal before a lord. A supplicant before a god.

But that just isn't the case. He just looks _done._ Like an old man who's thrown light into the darkest corners of life and saw what he didn't need to see. Like an old man who had to bury his best friend.

"Like this, huh?"

"Yeah," he murmurs. "Like this. I... I thought about it. Gave it a lot of thought. Lot of sleepless nights. Things fell this far. This is how it should go."

"Like Kurt."

Damien shrugs. A tiny, faraway gesture. "It's only fitting."

"Yeah." Don't think.

You take a deep breath. Don't think.

Nothing else to say. Don't think.

You rack the slide of the pistol. Don't think.

"Life is cruel, isn't it?" he asks.

"Our lives, maybe," you intone, aiming between his eyes.

The gunshot is lost to the waves.

You watch as he falls gracelessly forward.

You watch as the blood pools around his head.

Your breathing quickens. The thoughts overtake you. You clutch at your head. You're... you're warm.

You grit your teeth.

"Life is cruel, isn't it?" he asks.

You just look at him.

And look.

He looks back.

"Fifteen minutes."

Confusion cuts through the sagelike resignation on his face. He blinks. "What?"

"Just... fifteen minutes longer," you say. You clench your fist, not letting him see the red gathering beneath your nails.

He gazes up at you, eyes blank, at first. Then he nods. You extend a hand, and he grasps it. You lift him to his feet.

So for fifteen minutes, the two of you sit on the beach of Arcadia Bay, shoulder to shoulder, looking off into the ocean.

Remembering a better time.


	9. Good

You close the door behind you.

You throw your keys on the counter.

You are home.

You sit.

You sit for a long time.

You wait for it to come. For... the reality of it to crash down upon you.

But it doesn't. It stands at the end of the hall, watching you with curiosity.

Because you could just REGRESS. Turn it back. Be back in Arcadia Bay. Tell Damien that you'll figure it out. Tell Damien to come back. Tell Damien you'll work through this.

Tell Damien lie after lie.

In three days, this will become real.

In three days, you will realize what you have done.

In three days, there will be no going back.

And only then will you know who you truly are.

You sit.

It grows dark, but you do not turn on the lights.

You sit, and stare at your alarm clock. Stare at those blue digital numbers, bright and fuzzy in the darkness.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You open the door of the cafe.

The bell chimes.

You sit in your usual booth.

Sarah spots you, comes over with your usual. But she's not smiling. She looks stern as hell.

"You've been doing it," she says quietly.

You nod. You look down at your coffee. It's iced. You frown.

She sighs. "Did you look at your phone at all, yesterday? There was something I needed to tell you."

"Sarah," you whisper. You reach out and touch her wrist. Her skin feels cold. "Three days. In three days, I promise—I'll explain everything. Everything. But I'm never... I'm never doing _that_ again."

She catches your hand and squeezes it challengingly. There's a graveness in her eyes, though. "And how can I believe you, chronographer?"

You manage a weak smile. "That's what friends do, right?"

"We aren't ordinary friends."

You swallow at that. "True. But I'm willing to give it a try."

She drops your hand and tousles your hair. "That's the last thing either of us want," she says wryly.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You look up.

The city is burning.

Steel. Concrete. Glass. Cement. All is aflame, all is afire, all is bright. You walk upon the skin of a star.

Color was born and color died and long time ago. All is grey. All is black. Red is within, red is without.

The sky is black, roiling. Sparks come down like rain. Embers flutter like swarms of smoking fireflies.

You see them—the withered husks of people, once-people, charred to blackness, reaching out to you with skeletal hands. Their weeping, their cursing—it is lost in the roaring music of the flames.

You brush past them. As they touch you, they collapse away into the dust and join the ash on the wind.

But not all.

One hand grips your shoulder, and holds fast. You turn—and there stands Kurt, all but cremated, his nose and ears and lips and eyes burnt away. But he sees you, and you see him. It's been such a long time.

And another hand—you turn, and see Damien, mostly whole. The flames lap at his flesh, slowly eroding him like an old photograph. But his eyes shine. No hate, no wrath—just anguish in those eyes.

And then you see it.

The dog.

It sits there on angular, smooth haunches, waiting. Eyes like red searchlights. Still as stone.

It opens its mouth, opens so wide as to swallow all things that ever were and ever will be, and its beautiful-terrible song deafens the unborn and the living and the dead: **"COME AND SEE,"** it whispers.

Your best friends release you, and fade away into the smoke.

You walk towards dog. It stands, inclining its head to you, and turns, trotting slowly into the flames.

And this time, you follow.


	10. Here's to Us

"You know," he says, "I've been thinking."

"Good one."

"No, I'm serious," and of course he says it in that strange way of his. "Hear me out."

With a sigh, you pause the game, tossing the controller down on the couch. You lift your bottle, shake it a bit, find it empty. You stand and wander into the kitchen.

Kurt stretches out on the newly-vacant couch. Well, he'll keep it warm for you.

"I've been thinking," Damien continues, pointing at you with his glass, "that maybe... maybe you're not the only one."

"Only what? Person who can put up with you?"

His eyes glint. "You know what I mean."

You open the refrigerator, begin rearranging bottles. "You want anything, Kurt?"

"'Nother cider would be swell."

"Done."

"Man, you even listening?" Damien says, exasperated. He puts down his phone. He's watching the stocks, again.

You shut the refrigerator door, ciders in hand, and look at him levelly. "I am," you say. "I am, and I _have_ thought about it. And you know what I think?"

You let the words hang between you. Just long enough.

"I think, 'who cares?' So what if there are other timebreakers out there, Damien? If someone out there is rewinding time—well, how does that affect me? Affect us?" You shrug. "I don't know. I _can't_ know."

And it's kept you up at night.

You clap a hand on Damien's shoulder, give him an affectionate squeeze. "So I say, we drink for today. Before some asshole on the other side of the planet rewinds it."

"Cheers to that," Kurt says, raising his cider.

Even Damien, solemn Damien, can't help but smirk a bit at that. "Here's to you," he says, raising his glass.


	11. As We Watched

The three of you are sitting around the firepit.

This became a ritual some time ago, but you can't quite recall when. Just after high school, you think. Kurt would bring a handle of gin or something, Damien would bring cheap ten-dollar liquorstore cigars, and you would bring the flame.

Midnight came and went some time ago. But you've stoked the small flame, murmured promises to it, taught it the ways of the world with shreds of newspaper, coaxed it from being mere candlelight. Now, the fire stands as high as you, spitting embers upward to join the stars.

The fire is so bright, the woods surrounding you have become impenetrably dark. Beads of sweat stand out on the backs of your hands, on Damien's forehead, on Kurt's arms. You all move back a bit, straddling that line between the hair-singing heat of flame and the bitter cold of night.

Little is ever said around the fire. There's nothing to say, really.

But then Kurt says something.

"You always seemed like a god of fire." He smiles, his firelit features in sharp contrast. "But we were wrong. All along, you were the god of time."


	12. Almost Alone

You are sitting on the steps in front of Sarah's apartment.

You are sitting, and you are waiting. You, the one who can dislocate and dismember and disembowel time... _waiting._

But, in utter defiance of yourself, you are slowly coming to _enjoy_ waiting. The slow build of anticipation, even for the most banal of things. The microwave. Lines at the store. A responding text. The cooling of coffee.

Even right now, your ass on the cold flagstone, eyes unfocused on an overcast slate of sky, fingers drumming tunelessly, a spark of contentment swims somewhere in your intestines. This is okay. Things are okay. You are okay. You are waiting for a friend, and that is okay.

At the sound of footsteps, your vision focuses, and you look down—but it's not Sarah's gaze that greets you.

"'Sup," Aaron says.

"'Sup," you reply automatically.

Fuck.

He stands there, mid-step. "You waiting for Sarah?"

No, you're waiting for the statistically improbable yet very desirable meteor strike to obliterate you from the face of Earth. "Yeah."

"She and Cass should only be half an hour," he says. You suppose he meant that assuringly. "You been here long?"

You wish people would stop asking you about time. "No," you say, not sure if it's true or not. Not caring, either.

"Cool, cool. Well, I've got a spare key." And he easily steps over you and unlocks the door. "C'mon in."

So you do, hammering your frown into a vaguely polite line.

Aaron is Cassie's... well, he's her something. Not boyfriend. Not exactly a fuckbuddy. But between rather frequent sex and enjoyment of each other's company, the best you can come up with is that they're a _something._

You shut the door behind you, your skin savoring the warmth. And already, Aaron is methodically moving around the rooms, flipping light switches. You found this odd, at first. Until Sarah and Cassie visited your place one time, and Cassie asked why you kept your home so damn dark.

You didn't have an answer, so you made one. "Electricity bills."

Cassie bought it. Sarah sure as hell didn't.

Apparently satisfied with illuminating the place, Aaron ambles into the kitchen. You tense slightly as he passes the knife block. "You want a beer?" he asks, cracking open the refrigerator.

"I'm good."

"You sure?"

"Maybe later."

He nods, fishing himself out an IPA.

You sit down on the couch. Almost immediately, Aaron turns on the TV. You give a little start at the sudden burst of sound. You hope he didn't notice.

"Sorry," he says, sprawling down next to you. He smells like testosterone.

He can't even spend five minutes without background noise. Aaron always has a headphone on one ear or his car radio on or a computer playing something or other. Sedatephobia, clearly.

Instead of grabbing the remote and throwing it through the TV, you decide to be reasonable and look at the moving images instead. The news. Great.

Guy in a suit being led into court. Glasses. Goatee. Seems... familiar.

"The Jefferson case," Aaron declares.

"What?"

"Yeah, Mark Jefferson." He points his bottle at the screen. "Teacher from Arcadia Bay. Date raped a bunch of his students, and took pictures. Some crazy shit like that. I haven't really followed it."

"Huh."

"Yeah."

You both watch for a while. Apparently, they can televise court proceedings in Oregon. Your brain strains in two directions; one half wants to run as far away from anything to do with Arcadia Bay. The other half wants to go bury itself on that beach. Both make compelling arguments.

"Bullshit," Aaron says.

You blink. "What is?"

He points at the screen again. "This. A guy rapes a bunch of girls or whatever, calls it art, and a shitload of people are defending him. _That's_ bullshit."

You shrug.

"I mean, look at him. Teenage girl's wet dream. Authority figure, experienced, famous-but-not-too-famous. Kind of good looking—well, I wouldn't fuck him—doing the whole bachelor-artist thing. And that's the only reason!" He marches to the refrigerator, pulls out another beer. He pops the cap and sends it flying across the room. "I mean, some people are saying those girls actually _wanted_ it. Some people are saying that—that he was _driven_ to this, because the world can't appreciate 'true art'! I mean, what the fuck does that even mean? Can you believe that shit? If he was an ugly deformed old dude, they'd be calling to have him drawn and quartered."

"That's how it always is."

"And that's a fucking travesty!"

"I know."

He sighs, deflating as the indignation leaves him. "I can't watch this shit anymore. You wanna play Call of Duty?"

The thought of shooting even virtual people makes your stomach contort. But you smile easily. "Sure," you say.

0-0-0-0-0-0

When the third day came, you destroyed yourself.

You don't remember what you were doing, exactly. Those first two days after killing Damien felt so... normal. And the third felt normal too.

And then, you realized: day three. Cannot REGRESS.

And you then you realized Damien was gone.

And then you realized your best friends were gone.

And then you realized that you were alone.

0-0-0-0-0-0

The mirror, in this darkness, is almost not a mirror.

"You wouldn't kill a friend."

"But you'd die for me, wouldn't you?"

0-0-0-0-0-0

On the third night, you were sitting on your bed.

In one hand, your phone. In the other hand, your folding knife.

Damien said he thought about killing himself. Why didn't he? He knew what was coming. He knew you were coming.

Did he want closure? For himself?

For you?

What do you want?

You look at your phone, at Sarah's number and her picture—her sticking her tongue out at you.

How much effort would it take you to cut your own throat?

0-0-0-0-0-0

Your phone rings.

You drop it, terrified, your nerves raw.

It's Sarah.

She's calling you.

Why is she calling you?

You pick up your phone. Your hand is shaking.

You answer.

"Sarah," you whisper hoarsely.

"Day three. Time to talk," she says.

You nod, forgetting she can't see it. "Yeah," you say quietly. "Yeah."

0-0-0-0-0-0

She comes over and you tell her everything.

She's sitting down. You sit down. Then you stand up. Then you walk around. Then sit down again. Sometimes you're stock still. Sometimes you can't stop gesturing.

The more you speak, the more absurd the story sounds. The less you believe yourself. The more you think you may indeed be insane. That this may indeed be your dying dream.

But Sarah asks no questions. She simply listens, her eyes never leaving you, unreadable. You wish she would say something.

When you tell her about digging up Kurt, she says nothing.

When you tell her about torturing Kyle, she says nothing.

When you tell her about shooting Damien in the head, she says nothing.

Say something. Say something. Please.

Your throat is scraped rough and dry from talking.

"Please... say something."

Sarah looks at you. Into you. Through you.

"I believe you."

And for the first time since Arcadia Bay, you are afraid.


	13. Keep 'Em Close

You grit your teeth.

The Earth growls beneath your boots. It twists and thrashes at your grip, straining against you—but struggle as it may, it slows. Slows, painfully slows... slower... and with a shudder... stops.

And with a sound like a collective gasp of panic, everything moves backwards.

REGRESS.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You turn around, slowly, like the lone eye of a lighthouse.

"NASDAQ. Dow Jones. S&P." You say the words tonelessly. "Next fourteen days. Paper. Pen."

Kurt is immediately up and slides the notepad across the table. You begin scrawling out dates, numbers, names-all before you forget.

"Whoa, hey—"

"Good thing we didn't invest in gold," you mutter as you jot it all down. "Of all the paranoid—"

A red punctuation mark appears on the paper.

You blink.

... And there's another.

And another.

You hold a hand up to your face, your nose, and it comes away red. You watch the blood run down your hand, fill into the tiny valleys of your palm.

"What the fuck" is all you can say before you collapse to the floor.

... Well, you get about halfway there, anyway. Kurt catches you mid-fall- he's faster than he looks. So instead, you just look at the floor and look at the patterns your blood makes as it drip-drops to the hardwood.

Your vision blurs. You squint, wondering why Kurt's house seems to be flooded with sunlight when it's well past midnight. Or is that moonlight? It's not a full moon, is it? Nah, can't be, since—

"Hey. Hey! Are you— hey, _look at me!_ "

Don't be condescending, Kurt. You're right there. You see him. Just turn the lights down, damn, you're going blind, here. Damn hot lights. That blood or sweat on your face?

"Put me down," you utter, reaching an arm out to find a wall or furniture and groping at empty air.

"Your wish is my command." Kurt drops you unceremoniously into an armchair, and you sprawl there, staring up at the ceiling. Seems farther away then usual.

Something like moths on your face. You sputter, swat at it-but it's just Kurt with a wad of tissues.

"Get those out of my face."

"You're bleeding all over my everything, asshole. You stop bleeding, I'll stop tissue-ing."

So you sit there like a petulant child as Kurt tidies up your nosebleed. The room twitches back into focus in rhythm to the uneven stutter of your heart.

"Shit," you grunt, rubbing at your temples. You feel warm. "Shit."

"What the hell happened there?" Kurt's scanning his eyes over the rest of you, as if expecting blood to leap from your pores.

You just shake your head—and regret it, as you get dizzy again. "I don't..." You sniff, rub gently at your nose. Blood's crusting already. "I don't know."

0-0-0-0-0-0

"What are these?"

"Iron supplements," Damien says. "Don't take them on an empty stomach."

"I don't—"

"You're grey."

0-0-0-0-0-0

You grit your—

"Hey, hold on," Kurt says, grabbing your arm. You jolt back into the present, stumbling. "Are you sure— maybe you should—?"

"I'm fine," you say, pulling away.

"You're a shitty vision of fine," Damien says dryly, stepping forward. "Just wait another day."

You snort. "Catch me," you say, and REGRESS.

It's not a tunnel, or a vacuum, or a riptide.

It feels like home.

Is that strange? To have home be not a place, but _movement_ through places you've already been?

0-0-0-0-0-0

The first time you see it, you're positive you didn't see it.

Time and space was reversing around you, folding over and over again like the wrinkles of your brain. Familiar. Comfortable.

And then you saw something.

Just for a moment. As you were REGRESSING from the bank to Damien's house to a department store to the city proper to your home— you saw it, hunched low to the ground.

You saw it, yet saw through it. Not opaque, no. As though it was there and not there.

You grind to a halt, back in your home, breathing unsteadily and struggling to tame your heartbeat. You reach out, touch random things in your room to ground yourself. Foundation. Here. You're here.

Was that... ? No, it was nothing. And since it was nothing, you didn't see it.

That's that.

Problem is, it saw you.


	14. These Things

Three words.

That was all she said.

But to you—those may as well have been the first words ever spoken. You, in whom all language resides, waiting.

You stand there, breathing slowly, staring at Sarah.

She believes you.

Believes you!

Believes the time and you and the money and Damien and Kurt and the gun and you and the field and Arcadia Bay and and and and and-

And there it is, you feel it—heat, pressure, strain, all knotted like a spider's final mistake in your skull, all struggling to push itself out from behind your eyes.

You turn away, shutting your eyes tight.

Breathe. You are calm. You are in control.

Your hands are not shaking. You are calm. You are composed. You are—

Your hands are not shaking because every muscle in your body is contracting.

You are not shaking. You are vibrating. Every single red thread of your body is pulling itself tighter and tighter—

You are—

You—

You pull in air with a sharp gasp, but the air is frigid and cuts your throat. Ice crackles in your lungs.

Not in front of Sarah.

Not in front of her.

Don't—

You open your eyes, and the world is watercolor.

You sink to your knees, chin fallen against chest, staring down at the carpet.

You watch the tears make wet constellations.

And you feel two arms wrap around you, pulling you close.

She might be whispering "it's okay" or "I've got you" or "you're safe" or anything else, but you can't hear anything.

You bury your face in Sarah's chest. You smell coffee grounds and faint mint. From those two things you forge a black anchor and cling to it, for all else is sunless sea. Only this is real.

You can't look at her.

So she just cradles your head and keeps you close.


	15. To Be Sure

Where... ?

Ah.

There he is. You frown. He could have at least texted you saying "yo hey I'm over here" or something.

You sit down heavily in one of the plastic chairs set into the wall. The hinges groan at your weight.

In his left hand Damien is clutching an empty pack of cigarettes, working it open and closed with a thumb. In his _left_ hand. You raise an eyebrow.

Damien, you know very well, is ambidextrous. It's simply that he uses his right hand for just about every conceivable thing. His left hand is reserved for sliding one finger around a trigger or two into a woman. Why? Well... even he can't tell you.

See, now Damien has this... thing. Buys a pack of cigarettes, gives away all ten to people who look like they're having a shitty day (usually homeless people), then keeps the empty pack. He says he first did it when he was fourteen and stole a pack from some asshole. First it was an act of spite, then he realized that giving people stuff was a nice feeling. So he kept up the ritual, up until the point when he could buy his own cigarettes and realized how expensive they were. So now, this bizarre nicotine-charity thing was a rare occurrence.

But he did it today. So that's not good.

"You're late."

"Sorry." But he isn't.

"We couldn't meet anywhere else, huh?"

He shakes his head, his eyes roving slowly over the crowd. "No... it had to be here." He leans back, stretches, loosely slings an arm arm around your shoulder and gestures to the trains with the empty pack. "People coming, people going. It's good. Helps you think."

That's debatable. "Enough pedagogy for one day. What did you want to talk about?"

Damien looks over at you. "About time, of course."

You look at the trains. "Of course."

"Don't mute me. Not yet." He pauses, his voice more tentative. "Don't turn it back, either. Stay with me, okay? Stay and listen."

That's the closest Damien, in his entire life, has ever come to begging. You sigh, rubbing the heel of your palm against your eye. "Here I stay. And here I listen."

"Good. Okay." He takes a deep breath. He seems to pull life itself from the subway—the blaring voices over the speakers, the scrolling red text, the moving bodies, the rumbling of trains near and far.

"We had three theories," he says, and says it with a new sureness. "But I've got a fourth."

0-0-0-0-0-0

The three of you sit around the table. Kurt brought the Modafinil and Ritalin and caffeine, Damien brought the books and a few nice cigars ("This is a special occasion!"), and you brought the flame. Well, a candle. But that counts.

Out of the speakers you hear the murmur of Archive and Faunts and Amon Tobin and Portishead.

With open laptops and stacks of books on quantum physics and superstring theory and black holes, you spend eight hours researching, theorizing, debating, arguing. You scour over YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles and theses too crazy to be peer-reviewed. And argue more, naturally.

First you sit in the chairs, then on the floor, then on the table, then you're pacing around the room, gesturing into dimensions and geometry you can hardly comprehend. Then everyone's up, pacing, pointing, waving, trying to convey the impossible with the finite.

It's hot as Hell in here. Now you're all shirtless and sweating and the fan's on and that's not much help but the background noise is nice you suppose. Damien lights another cigar with your candle.

After eight hours, you're all sprawled on the floor, burnt out, reduced to a pile of higher-thinking limbs.

"Fuck this," you grunt, and REGRESS.

It's eight hours earlier, and you open your mouth and enlighten Kurt and Damien with what you've already discovered.

And they are amazed.

Yet another eight hours pass, and now you're pacing back and forth with your hands behind your back, cigar clamped in your teeth, looking for patterns in between the seconds as Kurt scribbles down equations that make your eyes blur.

And once again, you all collapse into a sweaty amalgamation of Mammalia.

"You going to turn back?" Damien slurs, turning a glazed eye towards you.

You just give him a toothy, hazy smile, and REGRESS.

This time, you're ready, and tell them to write down everything you say for the next hour.

They do. They then argue for the next four hours as you lay your head on the table and listen to your heart palpitations. And then you lift your head and join the fray.

Finally. Shot number three. You're all laying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, listening to the quiet crackle of the candle's wick.

You've got something. You've got three theories.

 _1\. Linearity:_ there is only one instance of time, and you are moving backwards in it when you REGRESS. Whatever is rewound is essentially deleted from existence.

 _2\. Divergence:_ there is just one instance of time, and every time you REGRESS you are creating a new timeline. The previous timeline continues, presumably indefinitely.

 _3\. Preordination:_ all instances of time are occurring on a track, and every time you REGRESS you simply insert yourself into a different timeline which coincidentally matches your desired outcome.

Too bad they're barely theories at all.

0-0-0-0-0-0

"So, I thought... what if... maybe if it's not _you_ who's moving through timelines, or rewinding a single timeline."

He lets that thought float in the air between you. You watch it, puzzled, before snatching it in your teeth. "What the Hell does that even mean?"

"I mean—" Damien holds his hands out, begins to gesture in that way he does— "I mean it's not your _consciousness._ "

"What?"

"That was one of our postulations, right? By the Divergence model, the 'you' existing in that timeline you rewound out of— that 'you' loses the timebreak?"

"Sure."

"But that raised the whole question of your consciousness, and where it was going, and how it was being affected, and if you became braindead in those abandoned timelines or something." He takes another breath. "So I thought... what if... what if an _outside_ source is moving through the timelines, not you?"

You stare at him, then down at your hands.

"I can't think of a good word—"

"Like... a parasite?" You swallow, work your throat. "Like I'm possessed?"

"Fuck, not like that. I mean—" He crosses his arms, pulls inwards. "I mean, like how we're always thinking about who else can timebreak like you. And I thought, well, what if anyone could do it? What if it's something anyone can do? People talk about hallucinations or deja vu or whatever, but— what if it's some kind of... entity... that uses humans as a vessel, and then these people can turn back time?"

You want to REGRESS out of this conversation and tell Damien no, sorry, can't make it, got shit to do. But REGRESSING suddenly feels a lot less like home. "So this thing..."

"Moves through time, but always comes back to you. It could choose anyone, but chose you."

You both sit there. A train pulls up. People get in. People get out. The train pulls away.

"You think it wants me to do something," you say.

Damien shrugs. "I'm not a biologist. Or a theologian. Maybe it wants you to do something for reasons we can't comprehend. Maybe it's an extra-dimensional organism that eats time. Maybe it's not even sentient, and it's just like a fungus or whatever."

"All of those options sound fucking terrible."

"Yeah," Damien says, crushing the cigarette pack in his hand and lobbing it into a trashcan. "Which is why I didn't want to tell you. But you'd want me to tell you. And it's not like you're seeing shit or hearing voices, so... I think the Linearity theory is our best shot, still."

You nod. You nod very carefully. "Yeah."

0-0-0-0-0-0

"Hey, let me see your hand."

You look suspiciously at Kurt. He's holding something behind his back.

"C'mon. Let me see it."

You warily extend your hand, and—

In a swift motion, Kurt locks something black around your wrist.

You look at it. It's a watch. Swiss and angular and seemingly knapped from obsidian.

"You, of all people, need it most," he says. "Think of this as making up for your thirteenth birthday."

You chuckle. "Now what petty grudge am I going to hold against you?"

"Eh, you'll find something."

0-0-0-0-0-0

What thoughts, then, rushed out of the hole in his head?

You hoped they were good ones.


	16. Dog Person

All around you, the world sleeps.

The plains, the mountains, the valleys. All is sleeping; all is dreaming of the great long grey; all has forgotten color. Ash and dust and bare rock and stark trees, as far as the eye dares to venture.

And there you stand on a monochrome ridge, so close to a dull slate sky you could touch it.

There. On the horizon, you can see it.

A single, shining point, like an old meteorite remembering its ancestry and springing back to life, ferocious and burning.

Miles and miles away. Miles and miles and miles and miles. But you can feel the heat on your face, drying out your eyes, chapping your lips. But something compels you to look, all the same.

You glance to the side.

Sitting beside you is the dog.

It looks up at you.

You look back.

And you get a good look at it for the first time.

It's... well. It's... huh.

Hard... to explain.

It's shaped like most dogs. And about the same size. But maybe it's a little bigger. Or maybe a lot bigger. When it sits it seems smaller, yet stands... larger, somehow. No matter how far away it is from you, it seems to be the same size. Like... it's always within arm's reach, even when it isn't, but it still is. Its proportions are ever so slightly off, you think. Limbs a little too long, paws a little too big. You try to count its fingers and your eyes begin to drift across the ground. A face a bit too short to be doglike. Or maybe a bit too long. As far as breeds go, you have no idea.

Its tail... well, you don't think it has a tail. Or maybe it does, just hidden by the angle. Hard to tell.

But it's black, and has gleaming white teeth, and has glowing red eyes. Of those three things you are absolute.

"It's been three days. You could have sent a letter."

Silence.

"You..." A breath. You lick your teeth. The world tastes very distinctly like nothing. "You're not even a dog, are you?"

What an absurd question. The absurdity of it clouds in the air. The dog seems to think so too, but is polite enough not to say anything.

"This is a dream, right?" You watch the words dissipate into the silence. "This is a dream." You nod to yourself, scuffing your boots in the grey silt. Reassurance. "My dream? Your dream? Ours, both—whose?"

The dog looks at you. Expectantly, perhaps? You've never been good at reading dog expressions. Or dream dog-yet-not-dog expressions, either.

"You could be—here—you're—" You struggle with the words, feel them stuck to the inside of your skull. The concepts are there, right damn there, so vivid in your mind. But your teeth and tongue can't free them. "... You're real, but you're not. You're real the way I'm not real, here. I'm not real, but I don't have to be. Not here. Since we're both... here and not here." Your brow furrows. No, no. It's coming out all wrong. It's not making sense the way it should.

It turns its eyes from you and continues gazing upon the distant blaze.

"It's always the—the same, the same thing. 'Come and see.' I'm here. But what—" You gesture at the red nova in the distance. "What am I looking at? What am I seeing?"

You pause.

"... _Am_ I seeing?"

You pause.

"... Did I already see it? Will I see it? Is there anything _to_ see?"

You pause.

"Am I... am I blind?"

They dog does not look at you. But staring at it, you realize something.

The dog's eyes don't glow. They never did.

They only reflect.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You reach out.

Your fingers grasp sheet and blanket, your fingernails scrape cotton, and nothing else. Finding nothing, you pull the blankets closer around you, burrow your face into your pillow with a soft groan, and—

You open your eyes, blink away the bleariness, let the color slowly flow back between the lines.

You lay there, staring at the ceiling. From the way the sunlight is coloring the walls of your room, it must be... nine— no, ten. Maybe even eleven. You need to relearn the concept of time, again. Like you're back to being four years old and making sundials out of stones in the dirt. You could simply turn your head and look at your alarm clock, but...

You don't.

You just lay there, just a little longer.

You're still in your clothes from last night, minus your boots. Your skin prickles with that weird slightly-sweaty-and-slightly-warm-clothes-feel as evidence.

You twist onto your side, looking at the space you've made in your bed. You run a hand over the bedsheet, expecting warmth, finding only your own.

Last night—

You curl in on yourself a bit, pulling your head into the crook of your elbow.

Last night, when she was holding you, when you wept into her chest. When you—so strangled by the delusion that dwells in the lowest of despair— almost upturned your face, hoping to find her mouth waiting. The last refuge of the desperate and the pathetic: anyone who will take them.

Something flickers to life deep in your abdomen. You decide it is disgust.

You could conjure a thousand different excuses. But you decide on weakness. It takes the least effort, and you've grown used to feeling shame.

The temptation still hums, static the color of heartbeats, deep down, where your muscle meets bone. You could REGRESS back, and—and maybe she would—

You bite down on the knuckle of your thumb. Hard enough to leave teethmarks.

Your other thumb pulls at your belt, adjusts your jeans. They feel rather alien all of a sudden.

With a grunt, you push yourself up, swing your legs off the bed, and sit there for a while, hands on knees.

Well, here you are, day one of the rest of your life.

You get up, take a step, and stumble over your boots (thoughtfully placed next to your bed). "Fuck," you mutter. Yes, the first word of the first day of the rest of your life is simply 'fuck.' Make a note.

You reach behind your bedside table and unplug the alarm clock. You just— you don't want to look at it.

You hook your fingers around the knob of the bedside table's drawer, hesitating, and pull it out.

The gleaming face peers patiently up at you. The second hand extends up to meet yours.

Black, stylistically geometric, decidedly Swiss, and still ticking like a dormant volcano.

You look at it. Must've cost Kurt at least a thousand, if not more. All of that time-fraud money. You'll need to get him one Hell of a birthday present to—

And then you remember Kurt won't be having any more birthdays.

You mechanically latch the watch on.

So you won't forget the time, or anything else.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You know that smell. Green tea. Longjing, gyokuro, fuck, you don't know—it's obscure enough that it doesn't show up on the Teavana website. You remember the first time Sarah was over and you offered her some coffee, and she just gave you a funny look and said "I work in a coffee shop, you know."

When you walk into your living room, Sarah is sitting at the kitchen counter, one of your PTSD management books cracked open in front of her, the stack on the floor. Two ceramic cups of something steaming.

She looks up from the book and smiles tiredly at you. "Hey." She slides one of the cups over to you.

Hair sticking out in all directions, circles under hazel eyes. Goddamn, she looks exhausted. Guilt scratches against the base of your spine. "Hey," you say. Your throat is still scraped raw from last night's monologue.

Her eyes flick to the watch, but she says nothing.

"So," you say.

"... So," she replies.

"You didn't have to stay."

"I know I didn't. But here I am."

"I mean, you have work—"

She gives a single-shoulder shrug. "A time-traveling friend revealing the secrets of time and space is a little more important than the cafe, don't you think? Thought things might get, how do you say... interesting. Had Todd cover my shift today. You remember Todd, right?"

You don't.

"Uh."

She chuckles. "Yeah, don't feel bad. Even Todd can't remember Todd."

Sure, okay. "Did you get any sleep?"

She tilts her head towards the couch. "Yeah. Miracle I did, considering everything you told me last night." She notes your bed-wrinkled clothing. "You sleep okay?"

"Yeah," you lie. You sit down next to her, letting the steam of the green tea warm your face. Odd smell. Not a bad smell, though. You could get used to it.

You sit in the quiet for a while, your shoulders touching; somehow that's too much and not enough.

And then: "What now?"

Sarah looks askance at you. "You're going to need to be more specific, there."

You grip your hands around the cup, wondering how hard you can squeeze before it shatters. "Sarah, I... fuck, I _killed_ someone. I stole thousands through the stock market. I don't—I want to be normal, I want _this_ to be normal. But... I don't know where 'normal' is anymore. I don't know where my 'crazy' ends and 'insane' begins. I don't know how to go back."

She turns around on the stool, looking at you critically. "First off, you're neither crazy nor insane."

You take a sip. Burns. Good. "I have my doubts."

"I'm serious. You won't get anywhere if you resign to thinking you've lost it."

You sigh. "I know."

"So here's what you're going to do. You're going to take it one day at a time, alright?"

You stare down into the tea. Your reflection stares back.

"Alright?"

"Sarah," you whisper, "I want it so bad. I want to turn it back—just a second—so bad." Because it's like perpetually being on the edge of orgasm, always on the verge of a needed sleep, forever being unable to remember something obvious but _almost._

And she reaches out and grabs your wrist.

"Stay."

So you do.


	17. Watch Them Leave

The headaches had always been there. As far back as you can remember, even before the nosebleeds. Static electricity, blue and hot, arcing under and over the wrinkles of your brain, rebounding off the walls of your skull. It wasn't the kind of thing you got used to, but it was something you could hide from Damien and Kurt.

But now, it's different. Now, you can feel... symmetry.

The headaches had a pattern.

Basal ganglia. Cerebellum. Cerebral cortex.

Pattern.

0-0-0-0-0-0

The first time you got stuck, you didn't realize you were stuck.

Chronostasis.

Rather technical term for a simple idea.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Ten thousand dollars.

Then twenty.

Then forty.

Then there were five zeroes.

And then the game had changed.

0-0-0-0-0-0

"Come on, it'll be funny."

You don't want to, at first. And Damien puts up a blatantly false show of resistance, the same way he's done ever since the fifth grade when he wants to keep the facade of cool but is too damn stubbon to admit that yes, he does like stupid things sometimes.

So you tell yourselves you're doing this ironically.

Yes, purely as an antimaterialistic, anticapitalistic gesture. Absolutely.

When Damien pops the cork of champagne over the laughing crowd of contemptible, shallow strangers, as the froth falls like semen on their whore faces, and you crack a one-sided smile—no, you're mocking them.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Kurt groans, massaging his temples. "I feel... like literal shit. I was digested by a creature made of ethanol."

Damien knocks back his fourth glass of water. His eyes look like the mouths of wild animals. "Want to do us all a favor and rewind a day?"

You're still working the taste of vomit and whiskey out from between your teeth. "Fuck you and fuck you. You deserve this."

0-0-0-0-0-0

As the money came in, all of you warily appraised each other, maintaining a careful distance.

Waiting for one of your to change.

But Damien was still Damien, Kurt was still Kurt, and you were still you. The money hadn't changed jack shit.

So you all had a laugh about it and had a smoke.

0-0-0-0-0-0

He starts the car.

"And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills..."

"Dixie Chicks? Really?"

Damien looks at you unapologetically, eyebrow raised. "Yeah, _really,_ " he says, deftly deflecting your hand away from the radio.

"... The landslide brought it down..."

Always the same. You wouldn't have him any other way.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Murder suicide. Dad killed his wife and kid. Just nearby, whole community shocked.

You stand up. Kurt looks back at you imploringly, helplessly.

But you smile. "Be right back."

0-0-0-0-0-0

It should have been you, right?

You should have been the one to shoot Kurt.

Because then Damien would have to kill you and then no one would be fucking with time and space and reality or whatever and then maybe things would be back to normal.

Yeah, Damien would be the last one standing. Yeah, he'd be all friendless and all alone. But fuck Damien. He's always—he was always—it's always been like this! Needs the last word, needs to be second guessing you, needs to be number one or he won't play. Ever since you were kids!

Whose fault? His fault! Fuck! They have so much money and nothing to spend it on so he goes and buys a gun—you were too but that's beside the point this is about him not you—

And now they're both dead and you're alone. Whose fault is that, huh?

Not yours. It can't be your fault.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Tina Mollison? Her and Damien? You didn't really see it. She was too... what's the word? Nice. Whereas Damien... was Damien. But Damien would rather tell a gory truth than a lie.

Tina and Damien, behind the gym, huh. Mouths closed, no tongue, but from Damien's description he discovered a new Goddamn continent full only of estrogen.

"If you tell anyone—anyone!—I'll kill you."

"Then why tell me?"

And he just stood there, mouth slightly open, eyes widening.

And that was the day you realized that maybe, just maybe, Damien just might be mortal like everyone else.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Because you'll die like everyone else, right?

Eventually. Of course.

But when it comes—and it will come—and you have that last moment of lucidity, of consciousness, what will happen? Will you lash out at time, catch the world in your hands, feel it grind against your palms as it tries to spin away?

How long will you stretch out your final moment? Another minute? Another hour? Will you keep REGRESSING over and over and over and over again when you get too close to the real thing?

How many times until—well, will your brain even let you? Let you brave into the space between present and future? Will panic and instinct rip time from your grasp and force you to keep going back?

You nod to yourself.

It'll have to be quick, then.

0-0-0-0-0-0

REGRESSING is harder to do, yet harder to resist.

And that four-legged shape watches, always watches, from the corner of nowhere.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You decide to go find some dry wood before the two of them froze to death.

Twenty steps later you've forgotten why you're wandering around in the forest.

But the cool breeze and the warmth of gin in your blood means you don't particularly care. So, hands in your pockets and chin tucked down contemplatively, you amble over the pine needles and wet soil, hopping from stone to stone. You lend your ears to birdsong, the rustle of undergrowth, let the indistinct shapes between the trunks be deer or raccoons or whatever else.

You follow the sun.

And suddenly you emerge from the trees and there's nothing but Pacific ocean and lighthouse.

And you realize you weren't following the sun, but following a sound.

Human sound.

You walk closer. The setting sun feels close, too close, but even in this light you can see a bench right at the edge of the cliff.

So you sit down. And you look out into the vast blueness and goldness and don't think anything, because the human brain can only create so many worthwhile thoughts, and you rightly decided that now is the time to be quiet.

But it's not quiet, because you hear someone crying.

You're not alone on this bench. You glance right.

Some girl is crying. Well, no, not really. Now she's putting on a front and trying to bottle it up now that a fuckin' tourist has wandered out of the woods.

... Well. You try to look back at the sunset, but it just hurts your eyes.

She's still sniffling. She must be, what, twelve? You can't tell. You can't tell is she's trembling from the crying or the cold, either.

And now, somehow, you feel miserable too.

And then:

... No, wait. And then:

"Are you okay?" you ask, and you're surprised by your own voice.

The girl nods, not looking at you.

"... Are you lost? Do you know where your parents are?"

A shake of the head, and then a nod.

"... Okay."

And you both sit there for a while longer. She sniffles.

"It's okay to cry," you say abruptly, blinking in surprise as you say it. "It's human. Humanizing." You gesture at nothing. "I should probably cry more, myself."

A hiccup. You hope it's a laugh.

"I don't—I don't know what's bothering you. I won't ask. But—it gets better. I—even if—even if things look terrible right now, it gets better. Because this moment, right now—it's just one moment. And... there are a lot more moments."

What a fucking lame thing to say. You almost want to throw yourself from the cliff and dash your head on those rocks. But, inexplicably, you don't.

Instead, you shuck off your favorite red jacket and drape it around the girl's shoulders, walking away before she can protest.

"In case it rains," you call over your shoulder.

When you get back to your improvised camp site, bundle of wood under your arm, Kurt asks what happened to your jacket.

You laugh. "What jacket?"

0-0-0-0-0-0

But that never happened. There was no girl. No sunset. No lighthouse. You wandered lost in the forest, and got unlost. That was it. That's what happened. Everything else?

"It never happened," you say.

"It never happened," agrees the basal ganglia.

"It never happened," agrees the cerebellum.

"It never happened," agrees the cerebral cortex.

"Then why do you remember?" someone in the distance asks.

"That's what I'm trying to figure out," you mutter.


	18. Old Blood

Your dead alarm clock sits on your bedside table for a week.

It looks good with that faint coat of dust.

Eventually, you admit to yourself that yes, you do need an alarm just like everyone else, and that you've gotten too good at muting your phone's ringer. All three of them.

Four days later, the box arrives at your front door, shipped from the sterile depths of some God-knows-where Amazon warehouse. You slice open the packing tape with your folding tape and withdraw your prize:

A classic analog alarm clock. Silver and cool. With the hammer and bells and everything.

You smile to yourself as you wind it up.

No more blue LEDs.

0-0-0-0-0-0

'The recovery process is sometimes best thought of as a management process.'

You throw the book across the room.

0-0-0-0-0-0

It's a matter of reinforcement, now. You try to find joy—well, not _joy_ , that's excessive, how about just _contentment_ —in the most banal of things. Clipping your nails (the damn things grow too fast). Brushing your teeth (and flossing too, when you feel like cutting up your gums). The most inane of the mundane.

Because that way, if you ever feel that urge to REGRESS—you can bargain with yourself, say that you'll lose all those moments. All those fucking stupid pointless bullshit moments you value anyway.

You haven't REGRESSED, so you like to think it works.

0-0-0-0-0-0

After too many months, you try your hand at masturbating again.

It feels like labor.

But you load up what used to be your usual free porn sites, sit down, endure the buffering, and work at yourself.

You don't like the way you smell. You're not sure why. You keep washing your hands. You should get stronger soap.

Three times a day. Sometimes four. Sometimes five. Sometimes— no, well, not really. Five and a half.

... It feels distant. Your teeth grind, your lungs constrict, you get a dull headache, but there's no... point. Just muscles and nerves, dutifully responding to fingers. Blood flowing out of habit.

You flick through the genres. Hardcore. Bondage. S&M. Roleplay. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. You feel like a zoologist watching mammals fuck without finesse.

... You see a panel for alt lesbian videos. Your throat tightens. You close the tab.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You try videogames again.

But something about being able to save and load and restart makes you… ill at ease.

So you stop.

0-0-0-0-0-0

November 13th, 2013. You stopped at exactly four red lights. Each light was red for a multiple of seven; fourteen seconds the first time, twenty one seconds the second time, twenty eight seconds the third time, thirty five seconds the fourth time.

November 14th, 2013. You encountered three pair of shoes corresponding to the primary colors. Red shoes. Green shoes. Yellow shoes. You idly wondered why you stare at the ground so much. There isn't much to see.

November 15th, 2013. You observed five different birds shit on five different cars, but all on the relatively same part of the car. Upper left side of the hood.

November—

Nov—

It is November 20th, and you are struggling.

You can remember every single day since _that day_ in vivid, uncomfortable detail. You could write a best-fucking-seller about what you did last Saturday, and you didn't do jack shit last Saturday. When you look at anything you've seen before your brain overlays what it looked like yesterday, the day before, the day before that, the week before. Everything is—you are walking through a kaleidoscope of everything being exactly the same.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You only have two eyes.

You keep telling yourself that.

0-0-0-0-0-0

The same salinity.

The same pH.

Sodium chloride.

You can feel it. Feel it. Fifty one times a minute you feel it.

And it feels you.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Whenever you hear a siren near your home, you tense.

You shouldn't. There's no need.

But you do.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You hold your folding knife in front of your face, studying the worn plastic grip.

This is fine. This is fine.

You flick it open. You gently press the point of the blade into the web between forefinger and thumb, where the skin is taut and thin.

You watch a tiny nebula of red emerge, just for a moment, and settle back into the knitwork of your skin.

You take a slow breath.

That's right. Take it easy. You still bleed _forward._

0-0-0-0-0-0

The migraines. The Goddamn migraines.

They move... downward. At an angle. Starting from the front, moving to the back on a sharp grade.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You sit on your bed, kicking your heels.

She picks up. "Uh— hello?"

"Sarah," you say.

"Oh— hey." You hear rustling on her end. "What is it? Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I just, uh, wanted to remind you that you have an early shift this morning."

Silence.

"I didn't— you know. I just had a feeling. I was already up, and I had a feeling."

"Okay," she says, and you know that if she was right there her eyes would be drilling right through you.

0-0-0-0-0-0

It's cold.

You don't feel it. You just know: it's cold.

You sit in the ash, cross-legged, hands clawed rigid against your knees. On the horizon, there is a city... somewhere. Without the usual massive pillar of smoke, it's hard to tell.

And, of course, there sits the dog.

"You're still here," you utter. "And I'm still here."

It looks at you.

"So there's still something we need to do." We. When you say _we_ , you say it like you're saying _I_. Hard and closed and clipped.

And then you feel the coldness; tiny bites making clean neat shallow holes in your skin and revealing the glistening white-red-white dermis underneath, sensitive and sore and exposed.

You know this feeling.

You lift you head up to a still, silent sky.

Rain.

0-0-0-0-0-0

The day you brutalized Kyle in his own home, the day you lowered yourself to less than an animal, you thought something had changed in you.

No, you hadn't changed.

The world changed. You simply noticed.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Sarah runs her nails over your scalp. It tingles. You shiver.

You remember reading something— _something_ — about the symbolic nature of haircuts and the reclamation of control in one of your PTSD books. You think. Sarah's fingers just make you want to close your eyes.

"Lean back a little," she says.

You lean back into her touch, closing you eyes. Sarah wraps your hair between her fingers, tugging just a bit. And then— snip.

Snip.

Snipsnipsnip.

"Uh, maybe you should slow down back there," you say, trying to roll your eyes back a little farther into your head. Not much success, there.

"Relax." She scritches you behind the ear, as if you were some great hairless simian dog.

"Can I have a mirror?"

Snip. "Not yet."

"… You've done this before, right?"

"Oh, sure. I had to give Caleb a few haircuts. He always thought I did a good job."

You try to sigh, but end up sputtering with a mouthful of trimmings. Sarah mercifully pulls the scissors away from your ear before she succumbs to laughter.

0-0-0-0-0-0

She asks if you want to keep any of your locks of hair. As a memento.

You say no, that's stupid.

She keeps one for you anyway. Says you'll want it eventually.

You doubt it.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You sit outside Kurt's house for hours.

You haven't been in there for... ever since... ever since _that._ But now is the time.

You went back to Damien's house and went through everything again—carefully removing any trace of yourself. It was easy, somehow. The house you had considered your second home, in a way, a house you had your own fucking front door key for. But now it was an alien land. Terra incognita. You turned the lights on in different ways, trying to recreate how the rooms were _supposed_ to look. But... no.

But Kurt's house... still looks like home. And that makes it so much worse.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Your eyes travel over the paper. Your sclerae must be black from sucking up the ink.

Sleepwalking. You've been sleepwalking ever since it started and they never told you.

Fuck.

"Fuck," you hiss through gritted teeth.

You flip through the pages. Your fingers trace over Kurt's flowing, looping script— "you write like a girl in gradeschool," you'd say—and then Damien's harsher, more cutting scrawl. It's disorganized.

 _Keep away from stairs._

 _Turns on faucets, shower, fills bathtub._

 _Stands under fire alarm. Looks at fire alarm._

 _Took fire extinguisher off the rack. Couldn't get it to work, thank God._

 _Keeps opening windows. Just stands in front of them._

 _Something about a city. Downtown?_

 _City? Landmarks?_

And then one page... with only four fevered words, massive and underlined.

 _WHAT IS THE DOG?_

0-0-0-0-0-0

"Wait, wait."

"What?"

"Let the water cool a bit before you pour it."

You squint at Sarah.

"Tannins react with the water at one hundred seventy—"

"I can't believe you memorize these things." You set your kettle back down on the stove, and sit with her at the counter. Sarah pulls at your hair a bit, straightening a few loose strands.

"Patience is a virtue," she says, lifting a finger sagely.

"But I want the tea _now_."

"Who, _you_?" She's looking through your drawers, now. You point to the one with the cooking thermometers.

"I'd rather get it over with."

She pats you on the back, and reaches over to hit a few buttons on your watch. Setting the timer, specifically.

"Two minute steep," she says to your incredulous expression.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Sarah is at work.

Cass is at home. Aaron is with her. He sent you a text saying "OCCUPIED" with a picture of Cass' apartment's doorknob, which translates to "hey we're having sex, please don't intrude, really, not that we don't like you but we're not into that kind of thing."

You appreciate the gesture.

Now you just need to find something to do.

So you sit on the floor of your living room for a while.

That's good too.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You've never been one of those types to 'hate' cities, the same way people 'hate' spiders or snakes. But having premonitions of a city getting annihilated-by-fire over and over and over and over again is enough to make anyone wary of sidewalks and stoplights.

So you take up hiking.

Kind of.

It's enough. It keeps you... preoccupied. Wandering between the trees and shrubs. Getting a bit sweaty. Roughing up your hands and knees and elbows. Forgetting.

You sit down, look at the dirt beneath your muddied boots.

When you look back up, you have to blink, because a cloud must have passed over—

You blink again. Squint. No cloud passed over the sun because there's _no sun_ , and an audience of stellar eyes looks down upon you.

... Did you fall asleep?

0-0-0-0-0-0

If Aaron ever noticed that you tend to avoid headshots in Call of Duty, he doesn't mention it.

Problem is that Aaron notices a lot. But he doesn't say anything.

0-0-0-0-0-0

It's easier to sleep at Sarah and Cass' apartment, somehow.

Maybe it's the alcohol, or the fatigue of watching bizarre 80's movies and constantly running commentary.

Or maybe it's just knowing you're not alone when your eyes finally close.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Your home looks presentable, now. Not HGTV or anything, but whatever.

No more clothes strewn about or dishes in the sink or books scattered across tables.

… You still keep it rather dark, though. Maybe one light or two.

Does it smell weird, though? You can't tell. Maybe you should open some more windows.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You lay your head on the bar counter. It's probably crawling with every STD ever, but... it's cool against your cheek.

"I got it," you say.

"You always get it," Aaron complains.

You roll onto your ear and lock onto him with one swimming eye. "I said _I got it_."

"You always pay. Like, the last three times, man." He looks... something. "I mean, shit, I must owe you a hundred by now."

You still.

0-0-0-0-0-0

There's a running joke.

Whenever you four are all at a restaurant, you're always the last to decide. Always. Because you always have to one-up what everyone else gets.

You let them believe that. If you tell them you struggle to read because the letters crawl like insects across the menu, well, they wouldn't respond well.

But out of your periphery you see Sarah watching as your eyes dart back and forth, struggling to catch the living ink.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You watch the ash fall through your fingers.

It... Feels a little bit like skin, somehow.

0-0-0-0-0-0

The first time you accidently come across a news story about Arcadia Bay, you slam Alt-F4 so hard you almost fling your keyboard off your desk.

Come on.

Look.

So you look.

… Just an update about the success of the cleanup, reconstruction. Ordinary post-disaster reporting. Nothing else. Nothing.

… You avoid local news sites, for a while.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Aaron isn't drunk.

He looks it, sure, but he isn't.

He reaches for his keys, but he ends up groping at the back of your hand.

"The fuck, man?"

"Crash here."

"Man, 'm fine. I can drive."

"I know _you_ can drive. But the bars just closed thirty minutes ago and the roads are full of assholes that can't drive."

Aaron tries to stare you down. And, you know, the funny thing is—he probably could, if he didn't smell like hops.

"Fine," he grumbles.

The next morning there's live coverage on a five-car pileup on the highway. No survivors.

Aaron can't seem to make eye contact with you.

0-0-0-0-0-0

"What time is it?"

"You have a clock on your phone."

"You have a watch."

You roll your eyes. "Killin' me, Aaron."

0-0-0-0-0-0

"What time is it?"

Cass looks over. "You have an appointment or something?"

"Well, no, I just—"

"Because this is the third time you've asked in the past fifteen minutes."

Oh.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Looking at you looking at it looking at you looking at it.

It doesn't blink. Neither do you.

"My eyes are open," you utter. But you can't know if you're seeing.

0-0-0-0-0-0

When you were a young kid, you didn't like time.

Didn't fit together just right. So you made your own time.

A hundred seconds to a minute. A hundred minutes to an hour. A hundred hours to a day. A hundred days to a month. A hundred months to a year.

A perfect sequence of ones and zeroes. Nothing out of place.

You would smirk to yourself when people talked about being "out of time," because—little did they know—you had given birth to your own.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Sixty seconds to one minute.

Sixty minutes to one hour.

Just... start there. Start small. Build back up.

0-0-0-0-0-0

There was a plan, of course. One you hid from Damien and Kurt, not well enough that they didn't suspect.

Hit your head really hard. Just enough for a hairline crack, if not less. Go to the hospital. Get x-rays, an MRI. See if anything is unusual with your brain.

But what if they find nothing? Or, more worryingly... what if they find _something?_ Who will know? Would someone recognize your brain? Is it... shaped differently, now?

... What if hitting it that hard made it go away?

Or made it worse?

You held a power drill to your temple, once. In the beginning. Staring in the mirror, tears starting to sting your eyes.

You couldn't do it then, when you were brave.

You definitely can't do it now.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Your phone vibrates.

You blink, rub at your eyes, look at the number onscreen. Don't recognize it.

What the hell. You feel daring today. "Hello?"

"Hey—it's, uh, it's me. Ellen."

Damien's sister.

You feel something in you extinguish.


	19. Home

You didn't remember being born.

[REGRESS]

You don't remember.

[REGRESS]

But you think-

[REGRESS]

It felt-

[REGRESS]

A little like this.

[RE-]

The world is sucked away into a great red cosmic drain and you're left behind, screaming in terror as everything flies past, and it screams back, fading into the distance. Shadows rise and fall and stretch into a horizon you can't see, stretching so thin they disappear.

And then you're alone, again.

You're the only thing breathing. Only thing thinking. It's just you, and the nothing. For just a moment. And then-

And then color and sound and heat and _sense-_

Comes _back-_

It returns from whatever great beyond it vacationed in for the past few eternities-

And hits you right the fuck in the brain.

You fall. Gravity returns, too.

You lie there, gritting your teeth so hard your gums bleed, sucking air in through flared nostrils, clutching at your head because it's cracked wide open and now all the time in the world is seeping out.

You vomit. Red. Smells like inside. Familiar. You lay in it, your body convulsing, contracting, spurting up more red, more stomach acid until an orangish bile seeps from your lips.

It's only after you can't throw up any more you realize you're crying.

And part of you hopes you fucking drown in those Goddamn tears.


	20. Switchback

Your organs pulse like mating animals.

You take shallow, cautious breaths, each one threatening to plunge your body into a barrage of further vomiting. You're sweating, sweating like Hell, there's sweat dripping from your fucking fingertips, but you're so cold you expect your breath to mist. Expect ice crystals to crackle between your numb lips.

It's... still... going.

You feel it. You're still REGRESSING. Fractions of a second. Fractions of a fraction. Too short for a mere human brain to measure. But you feel it.

And it would be so easy to just let one of those REGRESSES keep going and roll out of control, ride it out, rewinding into oblivion. So easy. And feel so good.

You try to wipe at your mouth, but lifting your arm takes too much effort. You're trembling. No, that's not- you're _vibrating._ Every muscle in you is clenched, coiled, ready to spring backwards. You're on the verge of a Goddamn temporal orgasm.

What day is it?

You cling to the earth. You silently beg something, anything to be your anchor. Anything.

Your fingers dig deeper into the carpet. You bury your face into it, gastric acid be damned. Today, home is your anchor.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You're dizzy. Dizzy like you're a kid again.

Your friends would challenge each other to spin, see who could outspin the rest. Five years old, you know. Old enough to know better but not wise enough to be better.

You'd always win, but you'd always fall, blinking at the sky, your guts roiling, breathing hard yet shallow.

Feeling like the world was spinning on without you.

0-0-0-0-0-0

"When should we stop?"

You glance over at the cloud of grey smoke. This again. "What?"

"You heard me the first time." Damien has a second black cigar clamped between his teeth, but he hasn't lit it yet. He flicks his lighter open and closed. Damien always loved that sound. You always found it annoying.

"Stop supporting your clove habit?"

"Stop going back."

You take a deep breath. You frown at the smell of cloves of nicotine. "When we have enough."

"What's enough, then?"

"Look, it's not like there's a specific number-"

"You said a hundred thousand. Remember? Five zeroes." His finger carves circles in the smoky air. "But we're well beyond that now, aren't we?"

"I don't feel like playing the rhetorical question game-"

"Then how about a rhetorical answer, to humor me? I mean, that'd be ideal. Knowing, even vaguely, when I can live for a day and know that it won't be erased."

You begin to take another deep breath, but you only get halfway there. You just let that smoke idle in your lungs, and you stare at Damien, holding your breath.

0-0-0-0-0-0

The vomit has seeped into the carpet. Doesn't matter. You can just REGRESS and clean it up later.

Your abs are sore. So is your jaw. You don't like being sick.

You roll your head to the side and look at your phone.

Ellen will call, eventually.

And you will pick up, eventually.

How much time do you need to prepare yourself?

"I killed your brother," you whisper hoarsely to your empty living room. "I shot him in the head and buried him on a beach."

"You make it sound so dispassionate," Damien murmurs. "But Kurt was always the fuckin' poet, not you."

"It'll sound awful no matter how I tell her."

"Yeah, true, true." He carefully steps over the pool of gastric acid, sitting crosslegged next to you on the carpet. He wipes at the sweat on your forehead.

Silence.

"So! Are you gonna tell Sarah?"

"Tell her what?"

" _This_ again..."

"That I, what, REGRESSED? I... fuck. I don't know." Your voice tapers off into a dull whine.

"Well, yeah."

"I promised her."

"You did." A pause. "Too bad you didn't REGRESS to before you promised her."

"You're making this worse."

"I know. Sorry."

Silence.

"I'm sorry I killed you."

Damien sighs, patting you on the shoulder. "I really don't know how to respond to that."

"You don't have to."

0-0-0-0-0-0

Your gums hurt.

You turn your head to stare at your dead LED alarm clock.

You almost wonder what time it is, but you catch yourself.

0-0-0-0-0-0

It's recess and you're playing secret agent.

You point your gun at that treacherous spy Damien, and he grins that lopsided grin, because he knows you'd never shoot him.

"Kurt's been captured by the girls. We should go save him."

You are six years old and you holster your gun, glaring at your best friend.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You made the mistake of REGRESSING again and now you've felt the sensation of throwing up backwards.

You make it halfway to your bathroom before destroying the carpet again, so you REGRESS until you can speedrun your way to the toilet.

You stumble and land in the bathtub instead.

Close enough.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You open the refrigerator because you're dying of thirst even if your stomach probably can't take a drop of anything.

There's that six pack of IPAs Aaron gave you as a gift.

You slam the door.

0-0-0-0-0-0

The lights hurt your eyes but if you keep them on then

The other eyes

Will not come

And see

0-0-0-0-0-0

You scream at nothing and everything and fling your dead clock against the wall.

You REGRESS. And do it again. It breaks differently. But not the right way.

REGRESS. Scream. Throw. Repeat.

Sometimes the scream is too quiet, the wrong pitch, too short. Sometimes the clock breaks into three or four pieces, sometimes only two and you want more than two.

Eight seconds, over and over again.

You get it eventually.


	21. Underline

Kurt was always looking.

At something or someone or somewhere. People talk about those kinds of looks that go 'through' people, but that wasn't Kurt. When Kurt was looking at you, you knew. It wasn't just goosebumps or the hair on the back of your neck. It was like the eye of some stellar god was staring right at you.

You remember, now, how back when you were younger, you'd all get your sleeping bags and crash in Damien's backyard, pretending you were special forces commandos deep behind enemy lines. Covering yourselves with bark and leaves, rubbing your skin and faces with wet dirt, barely breathing, tactically laying brittle branches all around to alert you to assassins in the night. You strained your ears to hear anything, anything at all. If the bad guys caught you, well, fuck 'em. You had nothing to lose but state secrets. They could torture you to death and they wouldn't get anything.

Maybe a "go fuck yourself" out of Damien, but that'd be it.

Your plots and schemes would fade into the moonlight as you dozed off. Well, Damien went first. Then you would start to struggle to keep your eyes open. But Kurt?

Kurt was looking. At you. At Damien. Watching over you, you supposed.

0-0-0-0-0-0

People talked about it, of course. Talked about Kurt's eyes. Mostly girls. It started in junior high, and never really stopped. Well, no, that's not true. When Kurt was born after an unremarkable labor, the doctor said, "What beautiful eyes!" You'll never know if that doctor was just being polite, but the point is that's where it all really started.

But, see, that was their mistake. It wasn't Kurt's eyes, it was how he used them. Mostly to make men uncomfortable and women weak-kneed. Inadvertently, of course. He wasn't Damien.

0-0-0-0-0-0

"Prove it, then."

You weren't used to feeling smug. But watching Damien's expression go from amused to baffled was one of the most satisfying things in your life.

"That... that's..." Damien stopped, frowned, crossed his arms. He cocked his head back and forth, sieving his brain for the right words. "You know I don't like saying 'impossible,' but... what you're doing..."

"It's very, very improbable," you offered.

"Yeah, I can work with 'improbable.'"

But Kurt, questioning and curious as he was, oddly enough asked few questions and wasn't all that curious. Sure, he looked confused, at first, but... then he really looked at you, and nodded. He believed you. Because he saw you had come back changed.

0-0-0-0-0-0

When Kurt fell to the floor of Damien's living room, hissing holes in his chest, he was still looking. Not just at Damien's stricken, horrified face. But at everything, somehow.

When you fell, unable to REGRESS to save his life, blood streaming from your nose, you looked, too. Looked at him looking at you looking at him.

And for a moment- a brief, tiny moment between heartbeats, between blinks, you thought you saw- really saw- for the first time-

And then it was gone, as Kurt mouthed two words to you as he died.

And he stopped looking.

0-0-0-0-0-0

It takes one hundred and fifty milliseconds for the human brain to recognize touch.

And a one-hundred-twenty-four grain nine-millimeter bullet moves at one-thousand-three-hundred feet per second.

So.

Even if he didn't feel it touch his forehead...

Did he feel it...

Inside?

0-0-0-0-0-0

And now the thing shaped like a dog is looking at you instead.

And you look back.

Looking at it looking at you looking at it, reflected forever in each other's eyes.

"This isn't going to end," you say quietly.

The dog doesn't say anything. It just looks away, looks off into the grey and empty horizon.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You try for Damien's phone number.

"Hello?"

You freeze. The voice over the receiver... is not Damien. "Oh, I, uh, I..."

A coarse, grainy laugh. "Wrong number, huh?"

You look down at your shoes. Stupid. "Uh... yeah."

"That's okay. Happens to the best of us. A lot easier to misdial with keys instead of the ol' rotary, y'know?"

You smile. You're not sure why. In a way, this man seems... familiar. "What's your name?"

"Ah, there I go, forgetting my manners. I'm Walter." He chuckles. "I'm a ninety-two year old man in a retirement home. I haven't picked up this phone in months, you know that?"

You didn't. You frown. "Oh. I'm... I'm sorry."

"No, no! Don't be. It's nice to have a chat with someone, even if they are a tenth of your age."

He wasn't trying to, but, well, that thought is quite miserable. So you turn, squint out of the window, and ask this gentleman Walter about the weather.

The two of you trade inane conversation-your pleasantries for Walter's platitudes-for a good ten minutes. He seems to pick up on your shortening list of topics, however.

"Well, it's been swell talking to you. You really made my day, you know that? Anywho-thanks again. Goodbye for now!"

You bid him goodbye and hang up.

You stand there a moment. You then remember you were going to call Damien about something.

Your thumb hovers over the number pad. You frown again.

You forgot to tell Walter your name.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Five years later, you were sitting at home, doing nothing.

You realized that Walter was probably dead by now.

You didn't know how to feel about that.

0-0-0-0-0-0

When you learned you could REGRESS, you wondered:

How far could you go back, really?

Could you go beyond the time you knew you could REGRESS?

A thousand questions. Zero answers. Empty prospects.


	22. Overturn

You sat in silence for a while. And then:

"So, there's this young woman sitting on a bench in a park. Sun's shining. Birds singing. Flowers blooming. And she looks miserable. Eyes all puffy. You know, like she's all cried out."

You glanced over at Kurt. He was staring straight ahead, eyes narrowed.

"Eventually, a man walks by, and sees her. At first he wasn't going to say anything, but she looks so sad, he can't help it. So he comes up and asks her what's wrong, and how she can be sad on such a beautiful day. She says, 'I'm so worried about the future,' and shakes her head."

You sat and waited.

"The man... he just stands there, he thinks a bit, and then he smiles and he says, 'If you're so worried, you should go see the fortune teller down the street. She'll solve all your problems, she knows everything.'"

Kurt turned and looked at you. "The woman bursts out into tears. 'I am the fortune teller,' she sobs, hiding her face in her hands."

You blinked. Kurt turned away, continued staring into nothingness.

"... Hey, that's pretty good," you offer lamely.

"No, it's really not."

0-0-0-0-0-0

You did something you never thought you'd do.

You started a journal. _Journaling._ That's the verb form. What an idiotic word.

Each page is a day. One out of three-sixty-five. You are careful to detail as much as possible-weather (temperature, clouds, humidity?), who you saw (in what circumstance?), where you went (by foot, by car?), what happened. Your fingers grew cramped. The pages bled. The pens ran dry, clawed uselessly at the paper. Ink found a dark home beneath your nails. You couldn't use a pencil-you didn't trust yourself with an eraser.

You needed to keep it all straight. Linear. Sequential. A to B, no detours or shortcuts or dimensional portals to C. You carefully wrote the time next to every single event, trivial as it may be. You kept trying to set up a kind of system-with columns or charts-but they never lasted more than a few pages. Columns or charts are straight, but they aren't _straight._ Stream of consciousness had to do.

Because it had happened already. You would REGRESS, and you suddenly couldn't figure out where you were, or what happened. You would sit Damien and Kurt down and have them, painstakingly and meticulously, contextualize.

After the third time, Damien flung the journal at you.

"I hate Cornell."

"You want wide ruled instead, asshole?"

You settled for Cornell.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Sometimes, you'd just sketch. Well, no, sketching isn't the right word. You'd... not draw, but let your pen wander. Let it go where it wanted to go, wherever that was.

In slow, easy, lazy circles.

And sometimes, when you'd turn to a new page, you'd find it staring up at you, a black and white eye, unblinking, everseeing.

Spiral.

0-0-0-0-0-0

"How far back can you go, you think?"

Damien's words hung in the air, and you looked at them, the way they obscured Damien's face in the evening light. They didn't look much like Damien's words, the way they flickered and shuddered.

"I don't know. It's..." You shrug. "It's like... the ocean, maybe. You can go back farther and farther, and you know there's more, but..." You shrug again. "I don't know. I don't think I can know."

Damien nodded, gazing into the distance.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Spiral.

0-0-0-0-0-0

When you were younger, sometimes you'd hear a scratching at your window. Fingers hunting for a frame.

And, in due time, the window would tortuously rise, creaking like an old coffin, and into your room would clamber Damien, mud on his boots.

"Sleep on the floor," you'd mumble, not bothering to roll over.

"Fuck that and fuck you," he'd grunt, burrowing into bed and stealing some of your sheets. If he was in a better mood, he's take his boots off beforehand. That was rare.

And you'd sleep like that, back to back. You'd feel Damien quiver with tension, at first, that would ebb out of his shoulders and spine, into you, into the world, and his breathing would become slow and even.

You'd stare at the wall in the dark, listening to the war in his lungs, waiting for him to go to sleep, before you allowed yourself to.

You'd rouse yourself in the morning, and he'd be gone, leaving prints of dirt in his wake. You'd see him that day at school, or at the field, or wherever-but he never brought it up.

So you didn't, either.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Spiral.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You know them by their footsteps.

Damien's are sharp, hard, sudden, determined. Ever moving forward, head lowered, chin tucked, horns at the ready. Train tracks and Roman roads may as well appear wherever he is marching, for those who stand in his way do not stand for long.

Kurt's are measured. Not a swagger, or a saunter, or anything like that, as easy as his arms may swing. But it's less like he moves, and more like the Earth moves under him. Atlas, inverted.

Even when one of his feet always touches the ground a little before the other, the Earth submits to his tread.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Spiral.

0-0-0-0-0-0

Your nose bleeds. You sniff, wipe at it. The taste of iron makes you remember:

"That it? That fucking it, you fucking faggots?"

You and Kurt and Jason strained to hold Damien back, but once he'd tasted blood he wouldn't stop until his veins are full. "Let it go, man-"

"Fuck that!" he snarled, easily dragging you forward a few steps. "These preppy fucks think they can run everything? Think banker daddy and trophy mommy will protect them? Fuck-that!"

James was still sputtering and gasping on the asphalt, his friends crowding over him, trying to help him up, but he swatted their hands away, pride a hot ember still glowing within him.

"Polo-wearing dickless queerbait," Damien sneered.

James wiped the blood from his nose, wincing. "You just made a mistake."

Damien scoffed. "Yeah? Come a little closer, I'll make a dozen more, Trust Fund."

"Damien!" you hissed.

He looked down at you. His eyes were dilated, cut lip pulled back to show red and white teeth. "Let go of me."

"No," you and Kurt uttered in unison.

"Shit, man, can we just go before the cops show up?" Jason whined.

The next day at school, Damien wasn't in class. You and Kurt glanced at each other from across the classroom.

For some reason, you weren't too worried.

0-0-0-0-0-0

You stared down at the paper.

That's not a spiral.

That's a fucking tornado.


	23. Beneath

You go.

Specifically, you go to the cafe. You sit in your usual booth of cracked leather and oak, coffee burning between your hands in a copper cup, staring straight ahead. This is where you do your thinking, now. Your home is... too wound up, too bound up, too full of memories of things that never were, of dreams that were never woken from. In that loneliness and in that silence, thoughts don't make any sense. Sense doesn't make any sense.

So you come here, instead. Feel the hum in the air of voices, of indie music you've never heard of and will never hear again (and that's fine), smell the coffee and tea and the slightest bite of bourbon in the air.

"Something's wrong."

You open your eyes, look up. Sarah is gazing down at you. You were debating even telling her-but she reads you so easily, now. You could REGRESS, but-

"Damien has a sister," you say.

Her eyes widen slightly. "Oh." She smooths down the front of her work apron. "Is she looking for him?"

"She called m-she _will_ call me, tonight. I... well, I, you know." You make a corkscrew motion with your fingers. "I'm... sorry. I meant to tell you, but... I was surprised, okay? And I didn't know what to do or say, so I just-"

"Hey." She puts a hand on your shoulder, grounds you to the present. "It's... well, it's not okay. But I understand." She looks back to the counter. "Talk after my shift?"

You sip at your coffee. Scalding and bitter. Perfect. "Yeah. Yeah."

0-0-0-0-0-0

You hold the letter in your hands.

In science class, once, your teacher had you hold a container of mercury. You remember marveling at how that liquid mirror could be heavier than lead.

This letter? Heavier than that.

"So... could you give it to him?"

Your eyes flick back up to... Clarissa. She's still standing there, expectantly, wringing her impeccably manicured hands. Girls like her never had reason to talk to people like you. But she found a workaround, clearly.

"It'd... make a better, uh..." You struggle. As with all things, you struggle. "Maybe you should... give it to him yourself."

Impatience flashes in her eyes. "Seriously? No. That's not how this all works. At all."

 _How what works?_ You wanted to blurt out. _Dating? Who the fuck does love letters anymore? Especially like this?_

"I mean-knowing Kurt-"

The impatience disappears. Her eyes are alight with interest, now. Something flickers and twists in your intestines-but it's gone before you can grasp it.

"If you just... told him, he'd be cool with that. You know? That's how he is."

At a distance, if someone were to see this-two people standing outside the school, after hours-they'd think _that_ was the romance happening. What a joke.

She sighs, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Or, at least, you think she did, but you didn't see the hair itself. Odd. "It's just... hard. You have these strong feelings for someone, and you want to tell them the right way."

"Yeah."

"And if you say it in person, right there-well, it could get all screwed up. Someone interrupts, or-"

"Yeah."

"-You forget what to say, or you get nervous."

You're still holding the letter in both hands like a ritual offering. If you let go, you'd drift into the atmosphere, to be pummeled by angry gods.

She takes the letter back. Feeling returns to your numbed fingers. Even in her hands, you can see the impressions of your fingerprints from clutching the envelope so hard.

"Thanks," she says. _For what? The therapy?_ You almost snap, but you keep your mouth shut. She tucks the envelope into her absurdly overpriced purse, but then she pauses and looks at you. "Why aren't you with anyone?"

"Uh," you say.

She gestures at you in a vague way. "You're... well, you're you." She twists her mouth in thought. "Okay, that sounded mean. It's that... you're..." She watches your face carefully as she speaks. "... People like you."

"Oh."

"You didn't know?"

"I mean, I had my suspicions."

"And you can be funny," she adds hastily.

"Right. Uh, thanks, Clarissa." Her name still feels alien on your tongue. "I've... got to get home. But I'll... see you later."

"Oh, yeah, you're right," she says, checking the time on her absurdly overpriced wristwatch. "I'll see you Monday."

You didn't see her Monday. Well, you did, but at a distance-she was too busy being tearfully inconsolable, as much as her friends tried. So perhaps she did see you, albeit through a kaleidoscope of tears and eyeliner.

"Shit, man."

Kurt looked up from his book. "Hm? What?"

"You. Clarissa. Damn."

His expression melted into blankness. "Oh." He shrugged. "Girls get emotional sometimes. Especially at our age."

"I wouldn't really know."

He chuckles slightly. "Sorry."

"Nah." You sit down on the grass behind him, rest your back against his. Feel the ridge of his spine. Balance. "But for real: why not Clarissa?"

"She's... well, c'mon, y'know."

"Do I?"

"You're gonna make me say it? Out loud? You already know."

You stay silent, but rock backward a bit.

"... Okay, okay. Promise not to tell her."

"I don't tell anyone anything." That was a lie. Kurt knew, of course. But he was always a trusting soul.

"She's... kind of..." He tugs on a few blades of grass. The hesitation drags like thorns against skin. "... shallow."

You rock back and forth with earnest, now. "Wow. Wowwww."

"Please don't tell her."

"Cold blooded."

"Would _you_ want her to be your girlfriend?"

You stop rocking. Your stomach hurts, suddenly. You look down at your lap.

"... I dunno."

Kurt shrugs. You feel his shoulders move against yours. "See what I mean?"

"... I guess. You know how people don't-"

"Hey." He peers at you over his shoulder. "They do, you know. It's just... it's high school. People are weird."

"People don't become un-weird after high school."

He turns back to his book. "True enough."

0-0-0-0-0-0

"Helen."

"Yeah."

Fuck, Sarah is a good listener.

0-0-0-0-0-0

It was a sibling thing, you think.

Helen was always chasing Damien's approval. Which was... odd, as she hated that he smoked, hated that he stayed out so late, hated that he drank and drove, hated the girls he 'dated,' hated the crude and cruel stories he'd tell.

And Damien hated her.

When you were all young, she always wanted to play with you-and Damien would say no, and you'd all run away and leave her to cry and go home-and you felt bad about it, sure. But Damien left her in the dust with such conviction that you almost felt like it was the right thing to do.

As you get older, she starts wanting to be around you all less and less. She has her opinions known, of course-how she let them be known-but she wasn't just 'Damien's sister' anymore. She was a person in her own right. But you never became a person in her eyes; you were still just 'Damien's friend' and little else.

Or maybe you were. One night when the window opened and someone slipped into your bed, and you felt their back against yours-you leapt up and snapped on the lights, blinking in confusion.

"What are you-"

"I wanted to try it."

"What?"

"Damien does it." She was still facing away from you, looking out the window. "So I wanted to try it."

"... He told you?"

"No, he doesn't tell me anything. Where else would he go?"

Your best friend's younger sister was in your bed, and your brain was still pulling in at the station. "Kurt's, obviously-Is something wrong?"

"Damien doesn't talk." The sulleness in her voice makes your joints hurt. "He just lies here and you let him."

"And how could you know that?"

The sarcastic bite clamps short. "He's my brother. I know."

"If your parents-"

"I'll be gone in the morning, okay? Just... let me stay." She turned-almost enough to look at you-but she stopped. "Please?"

She hadn't said please to you since she was... you don't know how old.

"I'll be in the living room if you need me," you said dully. Anger hissed under your skin. Fuck, you were tired. The light was hurting your eyes. You turned it off and stepped into the hall, closing the door behind you.

And, as she said, she was gone in the morning. Nothing to remember her by except for a stiff back and a wet pillow.

0-0-0-0-0-0

At Kurt's and Damien's and your graduation, Helen was there, looking so happy for Damien.

At her graduation, it was just and Kurt and you.

"I don't think she'll want to talk to us," Kurt said quietly. You could hear his voice, somehow, soft as it was, even with all of the clamor of celebration.

"I don't think so either," you admitted.

So when she finally came over and saw only you two-

"Hey," you said. "Congratulations."

-And she brushed right past.

0-0-0-0-0-0

"Any other war stories you'd like to regale me with?" Sarah's resting her chin in her palm, looking at you intently.

You almost laugh. "That's... that's basically it. The rest of it is... petty shit. Kids being kids."

"Kids being assholes."

"Well, yeah, that's a given."


End file.
